 CHAPTER X. THE ERA OF INDEPENDENCE, SECOND PERIOD. The second period of the era of independence may be said to embrace the nine years extending from the dissolution of the last volunteer convention, at the end of 1784, to the passage of the Catholic Relief Bill of 1793. They were years of continued interest and excitement, both in the popular and parliamentary affairs of the country, but the events are, with the exception of the last named, of a more secondary order than those of the previous period. The session of 1785 was first occupied with debates relating to what might be called the cross-channel trade between England and Ireland. The question of trade brought with it, necessarily, the question of revenue, of the duties levied in both kingdoms, of the conflict of their commercial laws, and the necessity of their assimilation, of the appropriations to be borne by each, to the general expense of the army and navy, of the exclusive right of the English East India Company to the Indian trade. In short, the whole of the fiscal and commercial relations of the two countries were now to be examined and adjusted, as their constitutional relations had been in previous years. The first plan came from the castle, through Mr. Thomas Ord, then Chief Secretary, afterwards Lord Bolton. It consisted of eleven propositions, embracing every division of the subject. They had been arrived at by consultation with Mr. Joshua Pym, a most worthy Quaker merchant, the founder of an equally worthy family, Mr. Groton, Mr. Foster, and others. They were passed as resolutions in Ireland and sent by Mr. Ord to England to see whether they would be adopted there also. The second pit, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, gave his concurrence, but when he introduced to the English Parliament his resolutions, twenty in number, it was found that in several important respects they differed from the Irish propositions. On being taken up and presented to the Irish Parliament in August, the administration found they could command, in a full house, only a majority of sixteen for their introduction, and so the whole arrangement was abandoned. No definite commercial treaty between the two kingdoms was entered into until the Union, and there can be little doubt that the miscarriage of the Convention of 1785 was one of the determining causes of that Union. The next session was chiefly remarkable for an unsuccessful attempt to reduce the pension list. In this debate, Curran, who had entered the house in 1783, particularly distinguished himself. A fierce exchange of personalities with Mr. Fitzgibbon led to a duel between them, in which, fortunately, neither was wounded, but their public hostility was transferred to the arena of the courts, where some of the choistest, more so of genuine Irish wit were uttered by Curran, at the expense of his rival, first as Attorney General and subsequently as Chancellor. The session of 1787 was introduced by a speech from the throne, in which the usual paragraph in favour of the Protestant charter schools was followed by another, advising the establishment of a general system of schools. This raised the entire question of education, one of the most difficult to deal with in the whole range of Irish politics. On the 10th of April, Mr. Ord, destined to be the author of just but short-lived projects, introduced his plan of what might be called national education. He proposed to establish four great provincial academies, a second university in some northwestern county, to reform the twenty-two diocesan schools so richly endowed under the 28th Henry VIII, and to affiliate, on Trinity College, two principal preparatory schools, north and south. In 1784, and again in this very year, the humane John Howard had reported of the Irish charter schools, then half a century established, that they were a disgrace to all society. Sir J. Fitzpatrick, the Inspector of Prisons, confirmed the general impression of Howard. He found the children in these schools puny, filthy, ill-clothed, without linen, indecent to look upon. A series of resolutions was introduced by Mr. Ord as the basis of better legislation in the next session, but it is to be regretted that the proposed reform never went farther than the introduction and adoption of these resolutions. The session of 1788 was signalized by a great domestic and a great imperial discussion, the tithe question and the regency question. The tithe question had slumbered within the walls of Parliament since the days of Swift, though not in the lonely lodges of the secret agrarian societies. Very recent outbreaks of the old agrarian combinations against both excessive rents and excessive tithes, in the Lenster as well as in southern counties, had called general attention to the subject, when Groton, in 1787, moved that, if it should appear by the commencement of the following session, that tranquility had been restored into the disturbed districts, the House would take into consideration the subject of tithes. Accordingly, very early in the next ensuing session, he moved for a committee on the subject, in a three-hour speech which ranks among the very highest efforts of his own or any other age. He was seconded by Lord Kingsborough, one of the most liberal men of his order, and sustained by Curran and Brownlow. He was opposed by Attorney General Fitzgibbon and by Messers Hobart, Brown, and Parsons. The vote was, for the Committee of Inquiry, 49, against it, 121. A second attempt, a little later in the session, was equally unsuccessful, except for the moral effect produced out of doors by another of those speeches, which it is impossible to read even at this day, without falling into the attitude and assuming the intonation and feeling the heartfelt inspiration of the orator. The Regency question was precipitated upon both parliaments by the Mental Disorder, which, for the second or third time, attacked George III in 1788. The question was whether the Prince of Wales should reign with as full powers as if his father were actually deceased, whether there should be restrictions or no restrictions. Mr. Pitt and his colleagues contended successfully for restrictions in England, while Mr. Fox and the opposition took the contrary position. The English Houses and people went with Pitt, but the Irish Parliament went for an unconditional regency. They resolved to offer the Crown of Ireland to him they considered de facto their sovereign, as freely as they had rendered their allegiance to the incapable King. But the Lord Lieutenant, the Marquis of Buckingham, declined to transmit their overzealous address, and by the time their joint delegation of both Houses reached London, George III had recovered. They received the most gracious reception at Carleton House, but they incurred the implacable enmity of William Pitt, and created a second determining cause in his mind in favour of an early legislative union. The prospect of the accession of the Prince to power wrought a wonderful and salutary change, though temporary in the Irish Commons. In the session of 1789, Mr. Gratton carried, by 105 to 85, a two-months in amendment to a twelve-months supply bill. Before the two months expired he brought in his police bill, his pension bill, and his bill to prevent officers of the revenue from voting at elections. But ere these reforms could be passed into law, the old King recovered, the necessary majority was reversed, and the measures, of course, defeated or delayed till better times. The triumph of the oligarchy was in proportion to their fright. The House having passed a vote of censure on Lord Buckingham, the viceroy, for refusing to transmit their address to the regent, a threat was now held out that everyone who had voted for the censure, holding an office of honour or emolument in Ireland, would be made the victim of his vote. In reply to this threat, a round robin was signed by the Duke of Lenster, the Archbishop of Tome, eighteen peers, all the leading Whig commoners, the Posenbees, Langrish's, Gratton, Connolly, Curran, O'Neill, Day, Charles Francis Sheridan, Bo's Daily, George Ogle, etc., etc., declaring that they would regard any such prescription as an attack on the independence of parliament, and would jointly oppose any administration who should resort to such prescription. But the bold and domineering spirit if it's given, the leader of the castle party, then, and long afterwards, did not shrink before even so formidable affalings. The Duke of Lenster was dismissed from the honorary office of master of the roles, the Earl of Shannon from the vice treasurer's ship, William Posenbe from the office of postmaster general, Charles Francis Sheridan from that of secretariat war, and ten or twelve other prominent members of the Irish administration lost places and pensions to the value of twenty thousand pounds a year for their overzeal for the Prince of Wales. At the same time Mr. Fitzgibbon was appointed Lord Chancellor, a vacancy having opportunity occurred by the death of Lord Lifford in the very midst of the prescriptive crisis. This elevation transferred him to the upper house, where for the remaining years of parliament he continued to dogmatize and domineer as he had done in the commons, often rebuked but never abashed. Indeed, the milder manners of the patrician body were ill-suited to resist this ermined demagogue whose motto through life was audacity, again audacity, and always audacity. The names of Wolfe, Toller, Corey, Coote, Beresford, and Cook are also found among the promotions to legal and administrative office, names familiar to the last generation as the pillars of the oligarchical faction, before and after the Union. To swamp the opposition peers, the earls of Antrim, Tyrone, and Hillsborough were made marquises of Antrim, Waterford, and Downshire. The Viscounts Glennolly, Enniskillen, Urne, and Caresford were created earls of Ennisley, Enniskillen, Urne, and Caresford. Then Judge Scott became Viscount Clonmell. Then the Lordships of Loftus, Londonderry, Kilmaine, Cloncurrie, Mountjoy, Glenworth, and Caledon were founded for as many convenient commoners, who either paid for their patents in boroughs or in hard cash. It was the very reign and carnival of corruption over which presided the invulnerable Chancellor, a true king of misrule. In reference to this appalling spectacle, well might Gratton exclaim, in a free country the path of public treachery leads to the block, but in a nation governed like a province to the helm. But the thunders of the orator fell and were quenched in the wide-spreading waters of corruption. The Whig Club, an out-of-door auxiliary to the opposition, was a creation of this year. It numbered the chief signers of the Round Robin, and gained many adherents. It exercised very considerable influence in the general election of 1790, and for the few following years, until it fell to pieces in the presence of the more ardent politics which preceded the storm of 1798. Backed though he was by Mr. Pitt, both as his relative in principle, the Marquis of Buckingham was compelled to resign the government, and to steal away from Dublin under cover of night like an absconding debtor. The Chancellor and the Speaker, Fitzgibbon and Foster, Irishmen at least by birth and name, were sworn in as justices, until the arrival of the Earl of Westmoreland in the ensuing January. The last two viceroys of the decade thus closed form a marked contrast worthy of particular portraiture. The Duke of Rutland, a dashing profligate, was sent over, it was thought, to ruin public liberty by undermining private virtue, a task in which he found a willing helpmate in his beautiful but dissipated duchess. During his three years' reign were sown the seeds of that reckless private expenditure and general corruption of manners which drove so many bankrupt lords and gentlemen into the market overt, where Lord Castle Ray and Secretary Cook, a dozen years later, priced the value of their parliamentary castle. Lord Rutland died of dissipation at a little over thirty, and was succeeded by the Marquis of Buckingham, formerly Lord Temple, the founder of the Irish Order of Chivalry, a person of the greatest pretensions, as a reformer of abuses and an enemy of government by corruption. Yet with all his affected superiority to the base arts of his predecessor, the Marquis's system was still more opposite to every idea of just government than the Duke's. The one outraged public morals, the other penchant and ennobled the betrayers of public trusts, the one naturalized the gaming table and the keeping of mistresses as customs of Irish society, the other sold or allowed the highest offices in honors of the state, from a weirship in the butter market to an earl's cornet, to be put up at auction, and knocked down to the highest bidder. How cheering in contrast with the shameful honors flaunted abroad in those shameful days are even the negative virtues of the Whig patricians, and how splendid the heroic constancy of Charlemont, Gratton, Currin, and their devoted minority of honest legislators. With Lord Westmoreland was associated as Chief Secretary, Mr. Hobart, formerly in the army, a man of gay, convivial habits, very accomplished, and politically very unprincipled. This gentleman, both favorites of Pitt, adopted the counselors and continued the policy of the late Viceroy. In pursuance of this policy a dissolution took place, and the general election of 1790 was ordered. We have already exhibited the influence which controlled the choice of members in the House of Commons. Of the 105 great proprietors who owned two-thirds of the seats, perhaps a fourth might be found in the ranks of the Whig Club. The only other hope for the national party was in the boroughs, which possessed a class of freemen engaged in trade, too numerous to be bought, or too public-spirited to be dictated to. Both influences combined might hope to return a powerful minority, and on this occasion, 1790, they certainly did so. Gratton and Lord Henry Fitzgerald were elected for Dublin over the Lord Mayor and one of the Aldermen, backed by the whole power of the castle. Curran, Posenby, Brownlow, Forbes, and nearly all the victims of their vote were re-elected. To these old familiar names were now added others, destined to equal, if not still wider fame, Arthur Wellesley, member for Trim, Arthur O'Connor, member for Philipstown, Jonah Barrington, member for Tom, and Robert Stewart, one of the members for the county down, then only in his twenty-second year, and next to Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the most extreme reformer among the new members. Arthur O'Connor, on the other hand, commenced his career with the court by moving the address in answer to the speech from the throne. The new parliament, which met in July 1790, unanimously re-elected Mr. Foster's speaker, passed a very loyal address, and after a fortnight sitting was parruged till the following January. The session of 91 was marked by no event of importance, the highest opposition vote seems to have been from 80 to 90, and the ministerial majority nevertheless than fifty. The sale of peerages, the East India trade, the Responsibility for Money Warrants Bill, the Baron Lands Bill, and the Pension Bill were the chief topics. A committee to inquire into the best means of encouraging breweries and discouraging the use of spiritous liquors was also granted, and some curious facts elicited. Nothing memorable was done, but much that was memorable was said, for the great orator still had a free press and a home audience to instruct and elevate. The truth is the barrenness of these two sessions was due to the general prosperity of the country, more even than to the dexterous management of Major Hobart and the cabinet-balls of Lord Westmoreland. There was, moreover, hanging over the minds of men the electric pressure of the wonderful events with which France shook the continent and made the islands tremble. There was hasty hope, or idle exultation, or pious fear, or panic terror in the hearts of the leading spectators of that awful drama, according to the prejudices or principles they maintained. Over all the three kingdoms there was a preternatural calm, resembling that physical stillness which in other latitude precedes the eruption of volcanoes. Before relating the consequences which attended the spread of the French revolutionary opinions in Ireland, it is necessary to exhibit the new and very important position assumed by the Roman Catholic population at that period. The relief bills in 1774 and 1778 by throwing open to Catholics the ordinary means of acquiring property, whether movable or immovable, had enabled many of them to acquire fortunes, both in land and in trade. Of this class were the most efficient leaders in the formation of the Catholic Committee of 1790, John Kea, Edward Byrne, and Richard McCormick. They were all men who had acquired fortunes and who felt the cherished independence of self-made men. They were not simply Catholic agitators claiming an equality of civil and religious rights with their Protestant fellow countrymen. They were nationalists in the broadest and most generous meaning of the term. They had contributed to the ranks and expenses of the leaders. They had swelled the chorus of Groton's triumph and borne their share of the cost in many a popular contest. The new generation of Protestant patriots, such men as the Honourable Simon Butler, Wolf Tone, and Thomas Addis Emmett, where their intimate associates shared their opinions and regarded their exclusion from the pale of the Constitution as a public calamity. There was another, and a smaller, but not less important class, the remnant of the ancient Catholic peerage and landed gentry, who, through four generations, had preferred civil death to religious apostasy. It was impossible not to revere the heroic constancy of that class and the personal virtues of many among them. But they were, perhaps, constitutionally too timid and too punctilious to conduct a popular movement to successful issue. They had, after much persuasion, lent their presence to the committee, but on some alarm, which at that time seems to have been premature, of the introduction of French revolutionary principles among their associates, they seceded in mass. A formal remonstrance against what remained, pretending to act for the Catholic body, was signed by Lord Kenmere and sixty-seven others, who withdrew. As a corrective it was inadequate. As a preventive, useless. It no doubt hastened in the end the evil it deprecated in the beginning. It separated the Catholic gentry from the Catholic democracy and thrust the latter more and more towards those liberal Protestants, mainly men of the middle class like themselves, who began about this time to club together at Belfast in Dublin, under the attractive title of United Irishmen. Whatever they were individually, the union of so many hereditary Catholic names had been a very great service to the committee. So long as they stood aloof, the committee could not venture to speak for all the Catholics. It could only speak for a part, though that part might be nine-tenths of the whole. This gave for a time a doubtful and hesitating appearance to their proceedings. So low was their political influence in seventeen ninety-one that they could not get a single member of Parliament to present their annual petition. When at last it was presented, it was laid on the table and never noticed afterwards. To their further embarrassment Mr. McKenna and some others formed with the Catholic Society, with the nominal object of spreading a knowledge of Catholic principles through the press, but covertly, to raise up a rival organization under the control of the seceders. At this period John Keough's talents for negotiation and diplomacy saved the Catholic body from another term of anarchical imbecility. A deputation of twelve having waited this year on the Chief Secretary with a list of the existing penal laws found no intention at the castle of further concession. They were dismissed without an answer. Under these circumstances the committee met at Allen's Court. It was their determination, says Keough, to give up the cause as desperate, lest a perseverance in what they considered an idle pursuit might not only have proved ineffectual but draw a train of persecution down on the body. Keough endeavored to rally them, proposed a delegation to London to be sent at the expense of the committee, offered at last to go at his own charge if they authorized him. This proposal was accepted, and Keough went. I arrived in London, he adds, without any introduction from this country, without any support, any assistance, any instructions. He remained three months, converted Mr. Dundas, brought back with him the son of Burke as Secretary, and a promise of four concessions. First, the majestacy, second, the grand juries, third, the sheriffs of counties, fourth, the bar. After obtaining Mr. Dundas's expressed permission and promise not to be offended, said to him, according to Charles Butler's account, since you give me this permission and your deliberate promise not to be offended, I beg leave to repeat that there is one thing which you ought to know but which you don't suspect. You, Mr. Dundas, know nothing of Ireland. Mr. Dundas, as may be supposed, was greatly surprised, but with perfect good humour, told Mr. Keough that he believed this was not the case. It was true that he had never been in Ireland, but he had conversed with many Irishmen. I have drunk, he said, many a good bottle of wine with Lord Hillsborough, Lord Clare, and the Beresfords. Yes, sir, said Mr. Keough, I believe you have, and that you drank many a good bottle of wine with them before you went to war with America. On the return of Keough to Dublin, a numerous meeting was held to hear his report. At this meeting the fair promises of the English ministers were contrasted with the hostility of the castle. The necessity of a strong organisation to overcome the one and hasten the other was felt by all. It was then decided to form the committee into a convention. By this plan the Catholics in each county and borough were called on to choose, in a private manner, certain electors, who were to elect two or more delegates, to represent the town or county in the general meeting at Dublin, on the third day of December following. A circular, signed by Edward Byrne, Chairman, and Richard McCormick, Secretary, explaining the plan and the mode of election, was issued on the 14th of January, and the Catholics everywhere prepared to obey it. The corporations of Dublin and other cities, the grand juries of Derry, Donegal, Letrim, Roscommon, Limerick, Cork, and other counties, at once pronounced most strongly against the proposed convention. They declared it unconstitutional, alarming, most dangerous. They denounced it as a copy of the National Assembly of France. They declared that they would resist it to the utmost of their power. They pledged their lives and fortunes to suppress it. The only answer of the Catholics was the legal opinion of Butler and Burton, two eminent lawyers, Protestants and Kings Councillors, that the measure was entirely legal. They proceeded with their selection of delegates, and on the appointed day the convention met. From the place of meeting, this convention was popularly called the Back Lane Parliament. Above two hundred members were present. The convention proceeded, Mr. Byrne, in the chair, to declare itself the only body competent to speak for the Catholics of Ireland. They next discussed the substance of the proposed petition to the King. The debate on this subject, full of life and color, has been preserved for us in the memoirs of Tone, who although a Protestant had been elected Secretary to the Catholic Committee. Great firmness was exhibited by Tealing of Antrim, Bellew of Galway, McDermott of Sligo, Devereaux of Wexford, Sir Thomas French, and John Keough. These gentlemen contended and finally carried without a division, though not without a two-days debate, a petition, asking complete and unrestricted emancipation. With the addition of the Chairman and Secretary, they were appointed as deputies to proceed to London, there to place the Catholic ultimatum in the hands of King George. The deputies, whether by design or accident, took Bellfast on their way to England. This great manufacturing town, at the head of the staple industry of the North, had been in secession the headquarters of the volunteers, the Northern Whigs, and the United Irishmen. Bellfast had demanded in vain, for nearly a generation, that its twenty-thousand inhabitants should no longer be disenfranchised, while a dozen burgesses, creatures of Lord Donagall, controlled the representation. Community of disenfranchisement had made the Belfastians liberal. The Catholic deputies were publicly received with bonfires and ringing of bells, their expenses were paid by the citizens, and their carriage drawn along in triumph on the road to Port Patrick. Arrived at London, after much negotiation and delay with ministers, a day was fixed for their introduction to the King. It was Wednesday, the 2nd of January, 1793. They were presented by Edmund Burke and the Home Secretary to George III, who received them very graciously. They placed in his hands the petition of their co-religionists, and after some compliments withdrew. In a few days they were assured their case would be recommended to the attention of Parliament in the next royal speech, and so, leaving one of their number behind as a charged affairs, they returned to Dublin highly elated. The viceroy on their return was all attention to the Catholics. The Secretary, who a year before would not listen to a petition, now labored to fix a limit to concession. The demand of complete emancipation was not maintained in this negotiation as firmly as in the December debates of the back lane Parliament. The shock of the execution of the King of France, the efforts of the secret committee of the House of Lords to inculpate certain Catholic leaders in the United Irish system and as patrons of the defenders, the telling argument that to press all was to risk all, these causes combined to induce the subcommittee to consent to less than the Convention had decided to insist upon. Gratton was the strong ground of the Government, and they kept it. Finally the bill was introduced by the Chief Secretary and warmly supported by Gratton, Currie, Pozenby, Forbes, and Hutchinson, provost of Trinity College. It was registered in the lower house by Mr. Speaker Foster, Mr. Ogle, and Mr. Dugganon, an apostate who exhibited all the bitterness of his class, and in the upper house by the Chancellor, the son of an apostate, and the majority of the Lord's spiritual. On the ninth day of April, 1793, it became the law of Ireland. By one comprehensive clause, says Tone, all penalties, forfeitures, disabilities, and incapacities are removed. The property of the Catholic is completely discharged from the restraints and limitations of the penal laws, and their liberty in a great measure restored, by the restoration of the right of elective franchise, so long withheld, so ardently pursued. The right of self-defence is established by the restoration of the privilege to carry arms, subject to a restraint, which does not seem unreasonable, as excluding none but the very lowest orders. The unjust and unreasonable distinctions affecting Catholics, as to service on grand and petty juries, are done away. The army, navy, and all other offices and places of trust are open to them, subject to exceptions hereafter mentioned. This may be masters or fellows of any college hereafter to be founded, subject to two conditions, that such college be a member of the university, and that it be not founded exclusively for the education of Catholics. They may be members of any lay body corporate, except Trinity College, any law, statute, or by law of such corporation to the contrary notwithstanding. They may obtain degrees in the University of Dublin. These and some lesser immunities and privileges constitute the grant of the bill, the value of which will be best ascertained by referring to the petition. It is true Catholics were still excluded from the high offices of Lord Lieutenant, Lord Deputy, and Lord Chancellor. What was much more important, they were excluded from sitting in Parliament, from exercising legislative and judicial functions. Still the franchise, the juries, the professions, and the university were important concessions. Their first fruits were Daniel O'Connor and Thomas Moore. The committee having met to return thanks to the parliamentary supporters of the bill, their own future operations came also under debate. Some members advised that they should add reform to their program as the remnant of the penal laws were not sufficient to interest and attract the people. Some would have gone much further than reform. Some were well content to rest on their laurels. There were ultras, moderate men, and conservatives, even in the twelve. The latter were more numerous than wolf-tone liked or expected. That ardent revolutionist had, indeed, at bottom, a strong dislike of the Catholic religion. He united himself with that body because he needed a party. He remained with them because it gave him importance. But he chiefly valued the position as it enabled him to further an ulterior design, an Irish revolution, and a republic on the French plan. The example of France had, however, grown by this time rather a terror than an attraction to more cautious men than tone. Edward Byrne, Sir Thomas French, and other leading Catholics were openly hostile to any imitation of it, and the dinner at Daly's, to celebrate the passage of the act, was strongly anti-gallican in spirit and sentiment. Keoh, McCormick, and McNevin, however, joined the United Irishmen, and the two latter were placed on the directory. Keoh withdrew when, in 1795, that organization became a secret society. The bishops, who had cheered on rather than participated in the late struggle, were well satisfied with the new measure. They were, by education and conviction, conservatives. Dr. Plunkett of Mieh, Dr. Egan of Waterford, Dr. Troy of Dublin, and Dr. Moylan of Cork were the most remarkable for influence and ability at this period. Dr. Butler of Casual and his opponent, Dr. Burke of Ossary, the head of the resolute, old, ultra-montane minority, were both recently deceased. With the exception of Dr. James Butler, Bishop of Cloyne, and Ross, who deserted his faith in order on becoming unexpectedly heir to an earldom, the Irish prelates of the reign of George III were most zealous and devoted body. Lord Dunn-Boyne's fall was the only cause of a reproach within their own ranks. His unhappy prelate made, many years afterwards, a deathbed repentance, was reconciled to his church, and bequeathed a large part of his inherited wealth to sustain the new national college, the founding of which, ever since the outbreak of the French Revolution, the far-seeing Burke was urging upon Pitt and all his Irish correspondents. In 1794 the Irish bishops, having applied for a royal license to establish academies and seminaries, were graciously received, and Lord Pitt's Williams government the next session brought in the act of incorporation. It became law on the 5th of June 1795, and the college was opened the following October with fifty students. Dr. Hussie, afterwards Bishop of Waterford, the friend of Burke, who stood by his deathbed, was first president. Some refugee French divines were appointed to professorships, and the Irish parliament voted the very handsome sum of eight thousand pounds a year to the new foundation. Mayneuth, whatever its afterlot, was the creation in the first instance of the Irish parliament. We have thus, in the third century after the Reformation, after three great religious wars, after four confiscations, after the most ingenious, cruel, and un-christian methods of oppression and proselytism, had been tried and had failed, the grand spectacle of the Catholics of Ireland restored, if not fully, yet to the most precious of the civil and religious liberties of a people. So powerless against conscience is, and ever must be, coercion. The Era of Independence, effects of the French Revolution in Ireland. Secession of Gratton, Curran, and their Friends from Parliament in 1797. The Era of Independence, which we have desired to mark distinctly to the reader's mind, may be said to terminate in 1797, with the hopeless secession of Gratton and his Friends from Parliament. Did the events within and without the House justify that extreme measure? We shall proceed to describe them as they arose, leaving the decision of the question to the judgment of the reader. The session of 1793, which extended into July, was, besides the Catholic Relief Bill, productive of other important results. Under the plea of the spread of French principles and the widespread organization of seditious associations, a plea not wanting in evidence, an arms act was introduced and carried, prohibiting the importation of arms and gunpowder, and authorizing domiciliary visits at any hour of the night or day in search of such arms. Within a month from the passage of this bill, bravely but vainly opposed by Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and the opposition, generally, the surviving Volunteer Corps, in Dublin and its vicinity, were disbanded, their arms, artillery, and ammunition taken possession of, either by force or negotiation, and the very wreck of that once-powerful Patriot army swept away. In its stead, by nearly the same majority, the militia were increased to sixteen thousand men, and the regulars from twelve thousand to seventeen thousand, thus placing at the absolute control of the commander-in-chief, and the chiefs of the oligarchy, a standing army of thirty-three thousand men. At the same period, Lord Clare, he had been made an Earl in 1792, introduced his Convention Act against the assemblage and convention of delegates purporting to represent the people. With Grotten, only twenty-seven of the commons divided against this measure, well characterized as the boldest step that ever yet was made to introduce military government. If this bill had been law, Grotten added, the independence of the Irish Parliament, the emancipation of the Catholics, and even the English Revolution of 1688 could never have taken place. The teller in favour of the Convention Act was Major Wellesley, member for Trim, twenty years later, Duke of Wellington. It became and still remains the law of Ireland. Against this reactionary legislation we must credit the session of ninety-three, besides the Catholic Relief Bill and the East India Trade Bill, with Mr. Grotten's Barren Lands Bill exempting all newly reclaimed lands from the payment of tithes for a period of seven years, Mr. Forbes's pension bill limiting the pension list to eighty thousand pounds sterling per annum, and fixing the permanent civil list at two hundred and fifty thousand pounds per annum, and the excellent measure of the same invaluable member, excluding from Parliament all persons holding offices of profit under the crown, except the usual ministerial officers and those employed in the revenue service. This last salvo was forced into the bill by the oligarchical faction for whose junior branches the revenue had long been a fruitful source of provision. Parliament met next on the twenty-first of January, ninety-four, and held a short two-month session. The most remarkable incidents of these two months were the rejection of Mr. George Posenby's annual motion for parliamentary reform, and the striking position taken by Grotten, Curran, and all but seven or eight of their friends in favour of the War Against the French Republic. Mr. Posenby proposed, in the spirit of Flood's Plan ten years earlier, to unite to the boroughs four miles square of the adjoining country, thus creating a counterpoise to the territorial aristocracy on the one hand, and the patrons of boroughs on the other. He also proposed to extend the suffrage to every tradesman who had served five years apprenticeship, and gave each county three instead of two members, leaving intact, of course, the forty-chilling freehold franchise. Not more than forty-four members, however, divided in favour of the new project, while one hundred and forty-two voted against it. Had it passed, the parliamentary history of the next six years could never have been written. It was on this reform bill and on the debate in the address that Grotten took occasion to declare his settled and unalterable hostility to those French principles, then so fashionable with all who called themselves friends of freedom in the three kingdoms. In the great social schism which had taken place in Europe, in consequence of the French Revolution of 1789 to 1991, those kingdoms, the favourite seat of free inquiry and free discussion, could not hope to escape. The effects were visible in every circle, among every order of men, in all the churches, workshops, saloons, professions into which men were divided. Among publicists, most of all, the shock was most severely felt. In England it separated Burke and Wyndham from Fox, Merskeen, Sheridan and Gray. In Ireland it separated Grotten and Curran from Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Arthur O'Connor, Edis Emmett, Wolf and Tone, and all those ardent, able and honest men who hailed the French as the forerunner of a complete series of European republics in which Ireland should shine out among the brightest and the best. Grotten, who agreed with and revered Burke, looked upon the anti-Jackabin War as a just and necessary war. It was not in his nature to do anything by haves, and he therefore cordially supported the paragraph in the address pledging Ireland's support to that war. He was a constitutionalist of the British, not of the French type. In the subsequent reform debate he declared that he would always and ever resist those who sought to remodel the Irish constitution on a French original. He asserted, moreover, that great mischief had already been done by the advocates of such design. It, this design, has thrown back for the present the chance of any rational improvement in the representation of the people, he cried, and has betrayed a good reform to the hopes of a shabby insurrection. Proceeding in his own condensed, crystalline antithesis, he thus enlarged on his own opinions. There are two characters equally enemies to the reform of parliament and equally enemies to the government. The leveler of the constitution and the friend of its abuses. They take different roads to arrive at the same end. The levelers propose to subvert the king in parliamentary constitution by a rank in unqualified democracy. The friends of its abuses propose to support the king in by the parliament, and in the end to overset both, by a rank and a vowed corruption. They are both incendiaries. The one would destroy the government to pay his court to liberty, the other would destroy liberty to pay his court to government, but the liberty of the one would be confusion, the government of the other would be pollution. We can well understand that this language pleased as little the united Irishmen as the castle. It was known that in private he was accustomed to say that the wonder was not that Mr. Shears should die on the scaffold, but that Lord Clare was not there beside him. He stood in the midst of the ways, crying aloud, with the wisdom of his age and his genius, but there were few to heed his warnings. The sanguine innovator sneered or pitied, the treculent despot, scowled, or menaced, to the one his authority was an impediment to the other his reputation was a reproach. It was a public situation as full of conflict as men ever occupied, and we are not astonished, on a nearer view, that it led, after three years hoping against hope, to the despairing secession of 1797. A bright gleam of better things shot for an instant across the gloomy prospect, with which the year ninety-four closed for the country. Lord Westmoreland was recalled, and Lord Fitzwilliam, largely connected with Ireland by property, and one of the most just and liberal men in England, was to be his successor. The highest expectations were excited, the best men congratulated each other on the certain promise of better times close at hand, and the nation, ever ready to believe whatever it wished to believe, saw in prospect the oligarchy restrained, the patriot's triumphant, and the unfinished fabric of independence completed, and crowned with honour. This new reign, though one of the shortest, was one of the most important Ireland ever saw. Lord Fitzwilliam, the nephew of Lord Rockingham, the first to acknowledge the Constitution of 1782, had married a Pozenby. He was a Burke Whig, one of those who, with the Duke of Portland, Earl Spencer and Mr. Wyndham, had followed the Great Edmund, in his secession from the Fox and Sheridan majority of that party, in 1791. Pitt, anxious to conciliate these new allies, had brought them all into office in 1794, Earl Fitzwilliam being placed in the dignified position of President of the Council. When spoken up for the Vice-Royalty he wrote to Gratton bespeaking his support, and that of his friends the Pozenbees. This letter and some others brought Gratton to London, where he had two or three interviews with Pitt, the Duke of Portland and Lord Fitzwilliam. Better still he made a pilgrimage to Beaconsfield, and had the benefit of the last advice of the aged Burke. With Pitt he was disappointed and dissatisfied, but he still hoped and expected great good from the appointment of Lord Fitzwilliam to the Office of Vice-Roy. It seems to have been fully understood that the new Lord Lieutenant would have very full powers to complete the gracious work of Catholic emancipation. With this express understanding Mr. Gratton was pressed to accept the chancellorship of the ex-checker, but steadily declined. He upheld in that position Sir Henry Parnell, an old personal rather than political friend, one of a family of whom Ireland has reason to retain a grateful recollection. He was, however, with Pozenbees, Curran, and others of his friends in both houses, added to the Privy Council, where they were free to shape the measures of the new administration. At the King's Levy, on the 10th of December, when Lord Fitzwilliam was sworn in, the aged Burke, in deep mourning for his idolized son, attended. Gratton was so much spoken to by the King as to draw towards him particular attention. Mr. Pitt, the Duke of Portland, and other ministers were present. All took and held atone that complete emancipation was a thing settled. Burke congratulated Gratton on the event, and the new Vice-Roy was as jubilant and as confident as anybody that the great controversy was at length to be finally closed under his auspices. On the 4th of January, Lord Fitzwilliam reached Dublin, and on the 25th of March he was recalled. The history of these three months, of this short-lived attempt to govern Ireland on the advice of Gratton, is full of instruction. The Vice-Roy had not for a moment concealed his intention of thoroughly reforming the Irish administration. On his arrival at the castle, Mr. Cook was removed from the secretarieship, and Mr. Beresford from the Revenue Board. It was a consternation and unscrupulous the intrigues of the dismissed. When the Parliament met at the end of January, Gratton assumed the leadership of the House of Commons, and moved the address and answer to the speech from the throne. No opposition was offered, and it passed without a division. Immediately a bill granting the Catholics complete emancipation, rendering them eligible even to the Office of Chancellor, withheld in 1829, was introduced by Gratton. On the oligarchy found their voices. The cry of the Old Church in danger was raised. Delegations proceeded to London, and every agency of influence was brought to bear on the King and the English Cabinet. From the tenor of his letters, Lord Fitzwilliam felt compelled in honour to tell Mr. Pitt that he might choose between him and the Beresfords. He did choose, but not till the Irish Parliament, in the exuberance of its confidence and gratitude, had voted the extraordinary subsidy of twenty thousand men for the Navy and a million eight hundred thousand pounds towards the expenses of the war with France. Then the popular vice-voy was recalled amid universal regrets of the people. The day of his departure from Dublin was a day of general mourning, except with the oligarchical clique, whose leaders he had so resolutely thrust aside. To them it was a day of insolence and unconcealing rejoicing, and what is not at all uncommon under such circumstances the infatuated partisans of the French Revolution rejoicing hardly less than the extremist Tories as the sudden collapse of a government equally opposed to the politics of both. Gratin, then whom no public man was ever more free from unjust suspicion of others, always remained under the conviction that Pitt had made merely a temporary use of Lord Fitzwilliam's popularity in order to cheat the Irish out of the immense supplies they had voted, and all the documents of the day which have since seen the light accord well with that view of the transaction. Lord Fitzwilliam was immediately replaced by Lord Camden, whose vice-royalty extended into the middle of the year 1798, a reign which embraced all the remains to us to narrate of the parliamentary politics of the era of Irish independence. The sittings of parliament were resumed during April, May and June, but the complete Emancipation Bill was rejected three to one, one hundred and fifty-five to fifty-five. The debates were now marked on the part of Tolar, Dugganon, Johnson, and others with the most violent anti-Catholic spirit. All this tended to inflame still more the exasperated feeling which already prevailed in the country between Orangemen and defenders. Thus it came that the High Court of Parliament, which ought to have been the chief school of public wisdom, the calm, correcting tribunal of public opinion, was made a principal engine in the dissemination of those prejudices and passions which drove honest men to despair of constitutional address and swelled the ranks of the secret political societies, till they became coextensive with the population. The session of 1796 was even more hopeless than the immediately preceding one. A trade motion of grottons on the address commanded only fourteen votes out of one hundred and forty. In the next session his motion in favor of equal rights to persons of all religious creeds obtained but twelve votes out of one hundred and sixty. From these figures it is clear that above a third of the members of the House no longer attended that those who did attend, the overwhelming and invariable majority, ten to one, were for all the measures of repression and coercion which marked these two sessions. The Insurrection Act, giving power to the magistrates of any county to proclaim martial law. The Indemnity Act, protecting magistrates from the consequences of exercising a vigor beyond the law. The Riot Act, giving authority to disperse any number of persons by force of arms without notice. The suspension of the habeas corpus, against which only seven members out of a House of one hundred and sixty-four voted, all were evidences to grotten that the usefulness of the House of Commons, as then constituted, was for the time lost or destroyed. It is quite clear that he came to this conviction slowly and reluctantly, that he struggled against it with manly fortitude through three sessions, that he yielded to it at length when there was no longer a possibility of resistance, when to move or to divide the House had become a wretched farce, humiliating to the country and unworthy of his own earnest and enthusiastic patriotism. Under these circumstances the powerless leader and his devoted staff resolved to withdraw, formally and openly, from further attendance on the House of Commons. The deplorable state of the country delivered over to an irresistible majestacy and all the horrors of martial law. The spread among the patriotic rising generation of French principles, the scarcely concealed design of the castle to go the people into insurrection in order to deprive them of their liberties, all admonished the faithful few that the walls of Parliament were no longer their sphere of usefulness. One last trial was, however, made in May, 1797, for a reform of Parliament. Mr. George Pozambi moved his usual motion, and Curran, Marty, Sir Lawrence Parsons, Charles Kendall Bush, and others ably supported him. The division was 30 to 117. It was on this debate that Groton, whose mournful manner contrasted so strongly with his usual enthusiasm, concluded a solemn exposition of the evils the administration were bringing on the country, by these effecting words. We have offered you our measure, you will reject it. We deprecate yours, you will persevere, having no hopes left to persuade or to dissuade, and having discharged our duty, we shall trouble you no more. And after this day shall not attend the House of Commons. The secession thus announced was accomplished. At the general election, two months later, Groton and his colleague, Lord Henry Fitzgerald, refused to stand again for Dublin. Curran, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Arthur O'Connor, and others followed his example. A few patriots, hoping against hope, were, however, returned. A sort of forlorn hope, to man the last redoubt of the Constitution. Of these was William Coiningham Plunkett, member for Charlemont, Groton's old borough, a constitutionalist of the School of Edmund Burke, worthy to be named among the most illustrious of his disciples. In the same July, on the seventh of the month, on which the Irish elections were held, that celebrated Anglo-Irish statesmen expired at Beaconsfield in the sixty-seventh year of his age. His last thoughts, his last wishes, like his first, were with his native land. His regards continued fixed on the State of Ireland, while vision and faculty remained. His last efforts in writing and conversation were to plead for toleration, concession, and conciliation towards Ireland. The magisterial gravity of Burke was not calculated to permit him to be generally popular with an impulsive people. But as years roll on, and education extends its dominion, his reputation rises and brightens above other reputations of his age, British or Irish. Of him no less truly than powerfully did Groton say in the Imperial Parliament in eighteen-fifteen, he read everything, he saw everything, he foresaw everything. His knowledge of history amounted to a power of foretelling, and when he perceived the wild work that was doing in France, that great political physician, intelligent of symptoms, distinguished between the access of fever and the force of health, and what other men conceived to be the vigor of her constitution, he knew to be no more than the paroxysm of her madness, and then, profitlike, he denounced the destinies of France, and in his prophetic fury admonished nations. CHAPTER XIII. Half measures of justice may satisfy the generation which achieves them, but their successors will look with other eyes, as well on what part has been won as that which is withheld. The part in possession will appear to their youthful sense of abstract right and wrong far less precarious than the part in expectancy, for it is in the nature of the young to look forward, as it is of the old to turn their regards to the past. The very recollection of their fathers will stimulate the new generation to emulate their example, and will render them adverse to being bound by former compromises. So necessary is it for statesmen, when they yield to a just demand long withheld, to yield gracefully, and to yield all that is fairly due. The celebrated group, known as the United Irishmen, were the birth of a new generation, entering together on the public stage. With a few examples, the leading characters were all born within a few years of each other, Nielsen in 1761, Tone, Arthur O'Connor, and Lord Edward Fitzgerald in 62, McNevin in 63, Samson and Thomas Addis Emmett in 64, and Russell in 67. They had emerged into manhood while the drums of the volunteers were beating victorious marches, when the public hopes ran high, and the language of patriotism was the familiar speech of everyday life. In a settled state of society it would have been natural for the first minds of the new generation to carry their talents gratefully and dutifully into the service of the first reputations of the old, but Irish society, in the last years of the last century, was not in a settled condition. The fascination of French example, and the goading sense of national wrongs only half-righted, inflamed the younger generation with a passionate thirst for speedy and summary justice on their oppressors. We must not look, therefore, to see the tones and emits continuing in the constitutional line of public conduct, marked out by Burke in the one kingdom and Grotten in the other. The new age was revolutionary, and the new men were filled with the spirit of the age. Their actions stand apart. They form an episode in the history of the century to which there may be parallels, but a chapter in the history of their own country original and alone. The United Irish Society sprung up at Belfast in October 1791. In that month Thielbold Wolf toned, then in his twenty-eighth year, a native of Kildare, a member of the bar, and an excellent popular pamphleteer, on a visit to his friend Thomas Russell in the northern capital, was introduced to Samuel Nielsen, proprietor of the Northern Star newspaper, and several other kindred spirits, all staunch reformers or something more. Twenty of these gentlemen meeting together adopted a program prepared by Tone, which contained these three simple propositions. That English influence was the great danger of Irish liberty, that a reform of parliament could alone create a counter-poise to that influence, and that such a reform, to be just, should include Irishmen of all religious denominations. On Tone's return to Dublin early in November a branched society was formed on the Belfast basis. The Honorable Simon Butler, a leading barrister, was chosen chairman, and Mr. Napper Tandy, an active middle-aged merchant, with strong Republican principles, was secretary. The solemn declaration or oath, binding every member to forward a brotherhood of affection, an identity of interests, a communion of rights, and a union of power among Irishmen of all religious persuasions, was drawn up by the Dublin Club, and became the universal bond of organization. Though the Belfast leaders had been long in the habit of meeting in secret committee, to direct and control the popular movements in their vincenage, the new society was not in its inception, nor for three years afterwards a secret society. When that radical change was proposed we find it resisted by a considerable minority, who felt themselves at length compelled to retire from an association, the proceedings of which they could no longer approve. In justice to those who remained, adopting secrecy as their only shield it must be said, that the freedom of the press and a public discussion had been repeatedly and frequently violated, before they abandoned the original maxims and tactics of their body, which were all open and aboveboard. In 1792 Simon Butler and Oliver Bond, a prosperous Dublin merchant of Northern origin, was summoned to the bar of the House of Lords, condemned to six months imprisonment and a fine of five hundred pounds each, for having acted as chairman and secretary of one of the meetings, at which an address to the people strongly reflecting on the corrupt constitution of parliament was adopted. In 94 Archibald Hamilton Rowan, one of the purest and most chivalrous characters of any age, was convicted by a packed jury of circulating the famous universal emancipation address of his friend Dr. William Drennan, the poet-politician of the party. He was defended by Curran in the still more famous speech which occurs to his apostrophe of the genius of universal emancipation, but he atoned in the cells of Newgate for circulating the dangerous doctrine which Drennan had broached and Curran had immortalized. The regular place of meaning of the Dublin society was the Taylor's Hall in Back Lane, a spacious building called from the number of great popular gatherings held in it the Back Lane Parliament. Here, Tandy, in the uniform of his new National Guard, whose standard bore the harp without the crown, addressed his passionate harangues to the applauding multitude. Their tone, whose forte, however, was not oratory, constantly attended. Here also the leading Catholics, Keoh and McCormick, the Gog and Magog, of Tone's extraordinary memoirs, were occasionally present. And here, on the night of the Fourth of May 1794, the Dublin society found themselves suddenly assailed by the police, their papers seized, their officers who were present arrested, and their meeting dispersed. From that moment we may date the new and secret organization of the Brotherhood, though it was not in general operation till the middle of the following year. This new organization, besides its secrecy, had other revolutionary characteristics. For reform of Parliament was substituted in the test, or oath, representation of all the people of Ireland, and for petitions and publications, the enrollment of men by baronies and counties, and the appointment of officers from the least to the highest rank as in a regular army. The unit was a lodge of twelve members, with a chairman and secretary, who were also their corporal and sergeant. Five of these lodges formed a company, and the officers of five such companies a baronial committee, from which again, in like manner, the county committees were formed. Each of the provinces had its directory, while in Dublin the supreme authority was established in an executive directory of five members. The orders of the executive were communicated to not more than one of the provincial directors, and by him to one of each county committee, and so in a descending scale, till the rank and file were reached, an elaborate contrivance but one which proved wholly insufficient to protect the secrets of the organization from the ubiquitous espionage of the government. In May 1795, a new organization lost the services of Wolf Tone, who was compromised by a strange incident to a very serious extent. The incident was the arrest and trial of the Reverend William Jackson, an Anglican clergyman who had imbibed the opinions of Price and Priestley, and had been sent to Ireland by the French Republic on a secret embassy. Betrayed by a friend and countryman named Cacain, the unhappy Jackson took poison in prison and expired in the dock. Tone had been seen with Jackson, and through the influence of his friends was alone protected from arrest. He was compelled, however, to quit the country, in order to preserve his personal liberty. He proceeded with his family to Belfast, where, before taking shipping for America, he renewed with his first associates, their vows and projects, on the summit of the Cave Hill, which looks down upon the rich valley of the Lagan and the noble town and port at its outlet. Before quitting Dublin he had solemnly promised Emmett and Russell, in the first instance, as he did his Belfast friends in the second, that he would make the United State his route to France, where he would negotiate a formidable alliance for the United Irishmen. In the year in which Tone left the country, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, brother of the Duke of Lentster, and formerly a major in the British Army, joined the society. In the next year, near its close, Thomas Addison Emmett, who had long been in the confidence of the promoters, joined, as did, about the same time, Arthur O'Connor, nephew of Lord Longville, the next member for Philipstown, and Dr. William James McNevin, a Canot Catholic, educated in Austria, then practicing his profession with eminent success in Dublin. These were felt to be important to sessions, and all four were called upon to act on the executive directory, from time to time, during 1796 and 1797. The coercive legislation carried through Parliament, session after session, the orange persecutions in Armagh and elsewhere, the domiciliary visits, the military outrages in town and country, the free quarters, whipping and tortures, the total suppression of the public press, the bitter disappointment of Lord Fitzwilliams' recall, the annual failure of Pozenby's motion for reform, finally, the despairing secession of Groton and his friends from Parliament, all had tended to expand the system, which six years before was confined to a few dozen enthusiasts of Belfast and Dublin, into the dimensions of a national confederacy. By the close of this year, five hundred thousand men had taken the test, in every part of the country, and nearly three hundred thousand were reported as armed, either with firelocks or pipes. Of this total, one hundred and ten thousand alone were returned for Ulster, about sixty thousand for Lenster, and the remainder from Canot and Munster. A fund, ludicrously small, fourteen hundred pounds sterling, remained in the hands of the executive, after all the outlay which had taken place in procuring arms, in extending the union, and in defending prisoners arrested as members of the society. Lord Edward Fitzgerald was chosen commander-in-chief, but the main reliance for munitions, artillery and officers, was placed upon the French Republic. CHAPTER XIV of popular history of Ireland, book XI by Thomas Darcy McGee. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Negotiations with France and Holland. The three expeditions negotiated by Tone and Louis Ness. The close of the year, 1795, saw France under the government of the Directory, with Carnot in the Cabinet, and Pichegrew, Jordan, Morel, Hosh, and Bonaparte at the head of its armies. This government, with some change of persons, lasted from October 1795 to November 99, when it was supplanted by the Consular Revolution. Within the compass of these four years lie the negotiations which were carried on, and the three great expeditions which were fitted out by Holland and France, at the instance of the United Irishmen. On the 1st of February 1796, Tone, who had sailed from Belfast the previous June, arrived at Havre, from New York, possessed of a hundred guineas and some useful letters of introduction. One of these letters, written in Cypher, was from the French Minister at Philadelphia to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Charles Lacroix. Another was to the American Minister in France, Mr. Monroe, afterwards President of the United States, by whom he was most kindly received and wisely advised on reaching Paris. Lacroix received him courteously and referred him to a subordinate called Maget, but after nearly three months wasted in interviews and explanations, Tone, by the advice of Monroe, presented himself at the Luxembourg Palace and demanded audience of the organizer of victory. Carnot also listened to him attentively, asked and obtained his true name, and gave him another rendezvous. He was next introduced to Clark, afterwards Duke de Feltre, Secretary at War, the son of an Irishman, whom he found wholly ignorant of Ireland, and finally, on the 12th of July, General Hosh, in the most frank and winning manner, introduced himself. At first the Directory proposed sending to Ireland no more than five thousand men, while Tone pleaded for twenty thousand, but when Hosh accepted the command, he assured Tone that he would go in sufficient force. The pacificator of Lavendee, as the young general was called, he was only thirty-two, one at once the heart of the enthusiastic founder of the United Irishmen, and the latter seems to have made an equally favourable impression. He was at once presented with the commission of a chef de Brigade, of infantry, a rank answering to that of Colonel with us, and was placed as adjudant on the general staff. Hosh was all ardour and anxiety. Carnot cheered him on by expressing his belief that it would be a most brilliant operation, and certainly Tone was not the man to damp such expectations, or allow them to evaporate in mere complimentary assurances. During the autumn months the expedition was busily being fitted out at Brest, and the general headquarters were at Wren. The Directory, to satisfy themselves that all was as represented by Tone, had sent an agent of their own to Ireland, by whom a meeting was arranged on the Swiss frontier between Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Arthur O'Connor, Dr. McNevin, and Hosh. From this meeting, the secret of which he kept to himself, the young general returned in the highest spirits, and was kinder than ever to his adjudant. At length, early in December, all was ready, and on the sixteenth the Brest fleet stood out to sea. Seventeen sail of the line, thirteen frigates, and thirteen smaller ships, carrying fifteen thousand picked troops. The elite of the Army of the Ocean, and abundance of artillery and munitions of war. Tone was in the indomitable, eighty guns commanded by a Canadian named Bedou, Hosh and the admiral in the frigate Fraternité, Grichy, so memorial for the part he played then and afterwards, was second in command. On the third morning, after groping about and losing each other in Atlantic fog, one half of the fleet, with the fatal exception of the Fraternité, found themselves close in with the coast of Cary. They entered Bantry Bay, and came to anchor, ten ships of war, and a long line of dark holes resting on the green water. Three or four days they lay dormant and idle, waiting for the general and admiral. Bouvet, the vice admiral, was opposed to moving in the absence of his chief. Grichy was irresolute and nervous, but at length, on Christmas day, the Council of War decided in favour of debarkation. The landing was to take place next morning. Sixty-five hundred veterans were prepared to step ashore at daylight, but without their artillery, their military chest and their general. Two hours beyond midnight, tone was roused from sleep by the wind, which he found blowing half a gale. Pacing the gallery of the indomitable till day dawned, he felt it rising louder and angrier every hour. The next day it was almost a hurricane, and the vice admiral's frigate, running under the quarter of the great eighty gun ship, ordered them to slip anger and to stand out to sea. The whole fleet was soon driven off the Irish coast. That part of it, in which Grichy and Tone were embarked, made its interest into breast on New Year's Day. The ship which carried Hosh and the admiral only arrived at La Rochelle on the fifteenth. The directory and the general, so far from being discouraged by this failure, consoled themselves by the demonstration they had made, of the possibility of a great fleet passing to and fro in British waters for nearly a month, without encountering a single British vessel of war. Not so the Irish negotiator. On him, light-hearted and daring as he was, the disappointment fell with crushing weight, but he magnanimously carried Grichy's report to Paris, and did his utmost to defend the unlucky general from a cabal which had been formed against him. While Tone was reluctantly following his new chief to the muse and the Rhine, with a promise that the Irish expedition was delayed, not abandoned, another, and no less fortunate negotiator, was raising up a new ally for the same cause in an unexpected quarter. The Batavian Republic, which had risen in the steps of Pichegrew's victorious army in 1794, was now eager to imitate the example of France. With a powerful fleet and an unemployed army, its chiefs were quite ready to listen to any proposal which would restore the maritime ascendancy of Holland and bring back to the recollection of Europe the memory of the pucent Dutch Republic. In this state of affairs, the new agent of the Irish directory, Edward John Loenis, a Dublin attorney, a man of great ability and energy, addressed himself to the Batavian government. He had been sent abroad with very general powers to treat with Holland, Spain, France, or any other government at war with England for a loan of half a million sterling and a sufficient auxiliary force to aid the insurrection. During a two-month stay at Hamburg, the habitual route in those days from the British ports to the continent, he had placed himself in communication with the Spanish agent there, and had, in forty days, received an encouraging answer from Madrid. On his way, probably to Spain, to follow up that fair prospect, he reached the Netherlands and rapidly discovering the state of feeling in the Dutch, or as it was then called the Batavian Republic, he addressed himself to the directors, who consulted Hosh, by whom in turn Tone was consulted. Tone had a high opinion of Loenis, and at once proceeded with him to the Hague, where they were joined according to agreement by Hosh. The Dutch Committee of Foreign Affairs, the Commander-in-Chief, General Dondels, and the Admiral de Winter, entered heartily into the project. There were in the Tell, sixteen ships of the line and ten frigates, victualed for three months, with fifteen thousand men and eighty field guns on board. The only serious difficulty in the way was removed by the disinterestedness of Hosh, the French Foreign Minister having demanded that five thousand French troops should be of the expedition, and that Hosh should command-in-chief. The latter, to conciliate Dondels and the Dutch, undertook to withdraw the proposal, and gracefully yielded his own pretensions. All then was settled, Tone was to accompany Dondels with the same rank he had in the breast expedition, and Loenis to return and remain as Minister-Resident at Paris. On the eighth of July, Tone was on board the flagship, the Reheade, seventy-four guns in the Tell, and only waiting for a wind to lead another navy to the aid of his compatriots. But the winds, the only unsubsidized allies of England, were strangely adverse. A week, two, three, four, five passed heavily away without affording a single day in which that mighty fleet could make an offing. Sometimes for an hour or two it shifted to the desired point. The sails were unclued, and the anchors shortened. But then, as if to torture the impatient exiles on board, it veered back again and settled steadily in the fatal southwest. At length, at the end of August, the provisions being nearly consumed, and the weather still unfavorable, the Dutch directory resolved to land the troops and postpone the expedition. The winter, as is known, subsequently found an opportunity to work out, and attack Lord Duncan by whom he was badly beaten. Thus ended Irish hopes of an aid from Holland. The indomitable Tone rejoined his chief on the Rhine, where to his infinite regret, Hosh died the following month, September 18, 1797, of a rapid consumption accelerated by cold and carelessness. Hosh, said Napoleon to Barry O'Meara at St. Helena, was one of the first generals France ever produced. He was brave, intelligent, abounding in talent, decisive and penetrating. Had he landed in Ireland he would have succeeded. He was accustomed to civil war, had pacified Lavendee, and was well adapted for Ireland. He had a fine, handsome figure, a good address, was prepossessing and intriguing. The loss of such a patron, who felt himself, according to Tone's account, especially bound to follow up the object of separating Ireland from England, was a calamity greater and more irreparable than the detention of one fleet or the dispersion of the other. The third expedition, in promoting which Tone and Lluenus bore the principal part, was decided upon by the French Directory, immediately after the conclusion of Peace with Austria in October 1797. The decree for the formation of the Army of England, named Bonaparte, Commander-in-Chief, with Dessay as his second. Clark consulted Clark as to who he most confided in among the numerous Irish refugees than in Paris. There were some twenty or thirty, all more or less known, and more or less in communication with the Directory, and Clark answered at once, Tone, of course. Tone, with Lluenus, the one in a military, the other in an ambassadorial capacity, had frequent interviews with the young conqueror of Italy, whom they usually found silent and absorbed, always attentive, sometimes asking sudden questions between great want of knowledge of the British Islands, and occasionally, though rarely, breaking out into irresistible invectives against Jacobitism and the English system, both of which he so cordially detested. Every assurance was given by the General, by the Directors, by Merlin Duday, Barras, and Talleyrand especially, that the expedition against England would never be abandoned. Tone, in High Spirits as usual, joined the Division under the command of his countrymen, General Kilmaine, and took up his quarters at Harve, where he had landed without knowing a soul in France two years before. The winter wore away in busy preparations at Harve, at Brest, and at La Rochelle, and which seemed mysterious to the Irish exiles at Toulon. All the resources of France, now without an enemy on the Continent, were put forth in these preparations. But it soon appeared they were not put forth for Ireland. On the 20th of May 1798, within three days of the outbreak in Dublin, Wexford and Kildare, Bonaparte sailed with the elite of all that expedition for Alexandria, and the Army of England became in reality the Army of Egypt. The bitterness, the despondency, and desperation which seized on the Irish leaders in France, and on the rank and file of the United Irishmen at home on receiving this intelligence, are sufficiently illustrated in the subsequent attempts under Humber and Bonpart, and the partial ineffectual risings in Lenster, Ulster, and Canot, during the summer and autumn of 1798. After all their high hopes from France and her allies, this was what it had come to at last. A few frigates, with three or four thousand men, were all that could be spared for the succor of a kingdom more populous than Egypt and Syria combined, the granary of England and the key of her Atlantic position. It might have been some comfort to the family of tone to have read, thirty years afterwards, in their American asylum, or for the aged Luenus to have read in the Parisian retreat in which he died, the memorable confession of Napoleon at St. Helena. If instead of the expedition to Egypt I had undertaken that to Ireland, what, he asked, could England do now? On such chances, he mournfully added, depended the destinies of empires. CHAPTER XV It is no longer a matter of assertion merely, but simple matter of fact, that the English and Irish ministers of George III regarded the insurrectionary movement of the United Irishmen as at once a pretext and a means for affecting a legislative union between the two countries. Lord Camden, the viceroy who succeeded Lord Fitzwilliam in March 95, with Mr. Pelham as his chief secretary, in a letter to his relative the Honourable Robert Stewart, afterwards Lord Castle Ray, announced this policy in unmistakable terms so early as 1793, and all the official correspondence published of late years concerning that period of British and Irish history establishes the fact beyond the possibility of denial. Such being the design, it was neither the wish nor the interest of the government that the insurrection should be suppressed, unless the Irish constitution could be extinguished with it. To that end they proceeded in the coercive legislation described in a previous chapter. To that end they armed with irresponsible power the military officers and the oligarchical magistracy. With that view they quartered those yeomanry regiments which were known to be composed of orangemen on the wretched peasantry of the most Catholic counties, while the corps in which Catholics or United Irishmen were most numerous were sent over to England in exchange for Scottish fensibles and Welsh cavalry. The outrages committed by all these volunteer troops, but above all by the orange yeomanry of the country, were so monstrous that the gallant and humane Sir John Moore exclaimed, If I were an Irishman I would be a rebel. It was indeed impossible for any man, however obscure or however eminent, to live longer in the country without taking sides. Yet the choice was at best a hard and unhappy one. On the one side was the castle, hardly concealing its intention of goading on the people in order to rob them of their parliament. On the other was the injured multitude, bound together by a secret system which proved in reality no safeguard against traitors in their own ranks, and which had been placed by its Protestant chiefs under the auspices of an infidel Republic. Between the two courses men made election according to their bias or their necessities, or as they took local or general political or theological views of the situation. Both houses of the legislature unanimously sustained the government against the insurrection, as did the judges, the bar, and the Anglican clergy and bishops. The Presbyterian body were in the beginning all but unanimous for a republican revolution and the French alliance. The great majority of the Catholic peasantry were, as the crisis increased, driven into the same position, while all their bishops and the majority of the Catholic aristocracy adhered to that which they, with the natural tendency of their respective orders, considered the side of religion and authority. This was the nation subdivided within itself, Protestant civilian from Protestant ecclesiastic, Catholic layman from Catholic priest, tenant from Lord, neighbor from neighbor, father from son, and friend from friend. During the whole of ninety-seven the opposing parties were in affirmant of movement and apprehension. As the year wore on, the administration, both English and Irish, began to feel that the danger was more formidable than they had foreseen. The timely storm which had blown Grichy out of Bantry Bay, the previous Christmas, could hardly be reckoned on again, though the settled hostility of the French government knew no changed. Thoroughly well informed by their legion of spies both on the continent and in Ireland, every possible military precaution was taken. The Lord Lieutenant's proclamation for disarming the people, issued in May, was rigorously enforced by General Johnston in the south, General Hutchinson in the west, and Lord Lake in the north. Two hundred thousand pikes and pike heads were said to have been discovered or surrendered during the year, and several thousand fire logs. The yeomanry and English and Scotch core amounted to thirty-five thousand men, while the regular troops were increased to fifty thousand and subsequently eighty thousand, including three regiments of the guards. The defensive works at Cork and other vulnerable points were strengthened at an immense cost. The pigeon-house fort near Dublin was enlarged, for the city itself was pronounced by General Valancy, Colonel Pakenham, and other engineer authorities dangerously weak, if not wholly untenable. A system of telegraphic signals was established from all points of the coast with the capital, and every precaution was taken against the surprise of another French invasion. During the summer of sizes almost every considerable town and circuit had its state trial. The sheriffs had been carefully selected beforehand by the castle, and the juries were certain to be of the right sort, under the auspices of such sheriffs. Immense sums in the aggregate were contributed by the United Irish for the defense of their associates. At the down of sizes alone, not less than seven hundred or eight hundred guineas were spent in fees and retainers. But at the close of the term Mr. Beresford was able to boast to his friend Lord Auckland that but one of all the accused had escaped the penalty of death or banishment. The military tribunals, however, did not wait for the idle formalities of the civil courts. Soldiers and civilians, yeoman and townsmen, against whom the informer pointed his finger, were taken out and summarily executed. Gasly forms hung upon the thick-set gibbets, not only in the marketplaces of country towns and before the public prisons, but on all the bridges of the metropolis. Many of the soldiers in every military district were shot weekly and almost daily for real or alleged complicity with the rebels. The horrid torture of picketing and the blood-stained lash were constantly resorted to, to extort accusations or confessions. Over all these atrocities the furious and implacable spirit of Lord Clare presided in council, and the equally furious and implacable Luttrelle, Lord Carhampton, as commander-in-chief. All moderate councils were denounced as nothing short of treason, and even the elder Beresford, the privy councillor, was compelled to complain of the violence of his noble associates and his inability to restrain the ferocity of his own nearest relatives, meaning probably his son John Claudius and his son-in-law Sir George Hill. It was while this spirit was abroad a spirit as destructive as ever animated the councils of Silla or Marius in Old Rome, or prompted the decrees of Robespierre or Marat in France that the genius and courage of one man redeemed the lost reputation of the law and upheld against all odds the sacred claims of personal liberty. This man was John Philip Curran, the most dauntless of advocates, one of the truest and bravest of his race. Although a politician of the School of Gratton and wholly untainted with French principles, he identified himself absolutely with his unhappy clients, pre-doomed to death. The genius of patriotic resistance, which seemed to have withdrawn from the island with Gratton's secession from Parliament, now reappeared in the last place where it might have been expected, in those courts of death, rather than of justice, before those predetermined juries, besides the hopeless inmates of the crowded dock personified in the person of Curran. Often at midnight, amid the clash of arms, his wonderful pleadings were delivered, sometimes as in Dublin, where the courtrooms adjoined the prisons, the condemned or the confined could hear, in their cells, his piercing accents breaking the stillness of the early morning, pleading for justice and mercy, pleading always with superhuman perseverance, but almost always in vain. Neither menaces of arrest nor threats of assassination had power to intimidate that all-daring spirit, nor, it may be safely said, can the whole library of human history present us a form of heroism superior in kind or degree to that which this illustrious advocate exhibited during nearly two years, when he went forth daily, with his life in his hand, in the holy hope to snatch some human victim from the clutch of the destroyer thirsting for blood. In November, 97, some said from fear of personal consequence, some said from official pressure in a high quarter, Lord Carhampton resigned the command of the forces, and Sir Ralph Abercrombie was appointed in his stead. There could not be a more striking illustration of the system of terror patronized by government, than was furnished in the case of Sir Ralph as Commander-in-Chief. That distinguished soldier, with his half-century of services at his back, had not been a week in Dublin before he discovered the weakness of the viceroy, and the violence of his principal advisers, the Chancellor, the Speaker, Lord Castleway, and the Beresfords. Writing in confidence to his son, he says, the abuses of all kinds I found here can scarcely be believed or enumerated. The instances he cites of such abuses are sufficiently horrible to justify the strong language which brought down on his head so much hostility, when he declared in his proclamation of February, 98, that the Irish army was formidable to every one but the enemy. These well-known opinions were so repugnant to the castle policy that the party held a caucus in the Speaker's chambers, at which it was proposed to pass a vote of censure in Parliament on the General, whom they denounced as a sulky mule, a scotch beast, and by other similar names. Though the Parliamentary censure dropped, they actually compelled Lord Camden to call on him to retract his magnanimous order. To this humiliation the veteran stooped for the sake of the King's service, but at the same time he proffered his resignation. After two months' correspondence it was finally accepted, and the soldier who was found too jealous of the rights of the people to be a fit instrument of their destruction escaped from his high position, not without a profound sentiment of relief. His verdict upon the barbarous policy pursued in his time was always expressed, frankly and decisively. His entire correspondence, private and public, bears one in the same burden, the violence, cruelty, and tyranny of Lord Camden's chief advisers, and the pitiful weakness of the viceroy himself. Against the infamous plan of letting loose a lustful and brutal soldiery to live at free quarters on a defenceless and disarmed people, an outrage against which Englishmen had taken perpetual security at their revolution, as may be seen in the Bill of Rights, he struggled during his six months' command, but with no great success. The plan, with all its horrors, was upheld by the Lord Lieutenant, and more than any other cause precipitated the rebellion which exploded at last, just as Sir Ralph was allowed to retire from the country. His temporary successor, Lord Lake, was troubled with no such scruples as the gallant old Scotsman. These followed each other in the first months of February 1798, fast and furiously. Towards the end of February, Arthur O'Connor, Father James Quigley, the brothers John and Benjamin Bins, were arrested at Margate on their way to France. On the 6th of March, the press newspaper, the Dublin Organ of the Party, as the star had been the Ulster Organ, was seized by the government, Lord Edward Fitzgerald and William Samson being at the time in the office. On the 12th of March, on the information of the Trader, Thomas Reynolds, the Lenster delegates were seized in Conclave, with all their papers, at the house of Oliver Bond in Bridge Street, Dublin. On the same information, Addis Emmett and Dr. McNevin were taken in their own houses, and Samson in the north of England. Of all the executive, Lord Edward alone escaping those sent in search of him. This was, as Toan notes in his journal, on the ill news reaching France, a terrible blow. O'Connor's arrest in Kent, Samson's in Carlisle, and the other arrest in Belfast in Dublin, proved too truly that Treason was at work, and that the much prized oath of secrecy was no protection whatever against the devices of the castle and the depravity of its secret agents. The extent to which that treason extended, the number of associates who were in the pay of their deadly enemies, was never known to the United Irish leaders. Time has, however, long since revealed the secrets of the prison-house, and we know now that men they trusted with all their plans and hopes, such as McNally and McGookin, were quite as deep in the conspiracy to destroy them as Mr. Reynolds and Captain Armstrong. The most influential members of the Dublin society remaining at large contrived to correspond with each other, or to meet by stealth after the arrest at Bonds. The vacancies in the executive were filled up by the brothers John and Henry Shears, both barristers, sons of a wealthy Cork banker and former members of Parliament, and by Mr. Lawless assertion. For two months longer these gentlemen continued to act in concert with Lord Edward, who remained undetected, not withstanding all the efforts of the government, from the twelfth of March till the nineteenth of May following. During those two months the new directors devoted themselves with the utmost energy to hurrying on the armament of the people, and especially to making proselytes among the militia where the gain of one man armed and disciplined was justly accounted equal to the enlistment of three or four ordinary adherents. This part of their plan brought the brothers' Shears into contact, among others, with Captain John W. Armstrong, of the Queen's country Yeomanry, whom they supposed they had won over, but who was in reality a better class spy, acting under Lord Castleray's instructions. Armstrong cultivated them sedulously, dined at their table, echoed their opinions, and led the credulous brothers on to their destruction. All at last was determined on, the day of the rising was fixed, the twenty-third day of May, and the signal was to be the simultaneous stoppage of the male coaches, which started nightly from the Dublin Post Office, to every quarter of the kingdom. But the counter-plot anticipated the plot. Lord Edward, betrayed by a person called Higgins, proprietor of the Freeman's Journal, was taken on the nineteenth of May, after a desperate struggle with Major Swan and Sear, and Captain Ryan, in his hiding place in Thomas Street. The brothers' Shears were arrested in their own house on the morning of the twenty-first, while Surgeon Lawless escaped from the city, and finally from the country to France. Thus for the second time was the insurrection left without a head, but the organization had proceeded too far to be any longer restrained, and the castle, moreover, to use the expression of Lord Castle Ray, took means to make it explode. The first intelligence of the rebellion was received in Dublin on the morning of the twenty-fourth of May. At Rathfarnam, within three miles of the city, five hundred insurgents attacked Lord Eli's Yeomanry Corps with some success, till Lord Rodin's dragoons, hastily dispatched from the city, compelled them to retreat, with the loss of some prisoners and two men killed, whom Mr. Beresford saw the next day, literally cut to pieces, a horrid sight. At Dunboyne the insurgents piked in escort of the Ray Fensibles, scotch, passing through their village, and carried off their baggage. At Noss a large popular force attacked the garrison, consisting of regulars, ancient Britons, Welsh, part of a regimen of dragoons, and the Armog militia. The attack was renewed three times with great bravery, but finally discipline, as it always will, prevailed over mere numbers, and the assailants were repulsed with the loss of one hundred and forty of their comrades. At Prosperous, where they cut off to a man a strong garrison composed of North Cork militia under Captain Swain, the rising was more successful. The commander in this exploit was Dr. Esmond, brother of the Wexford Baronet, who being betrayed by one of his own subalterns was the next morning arrested at breakfast in the neighborhood, and suffered death at Dublin on the fourteenth of the following month. There could hardly be found a more unfavorable field for a peasant war than the generally level and easily accessible county of Kildare, every parish of which is within a day's march of Dublin. From having been the residence of Lord Edward, it was perhaps one of the most highly organized parts of Lenster, but as it had the misfortune to be represented by Thomas Reynolds as a county delegate, it labored under the disadvantage of having its organization better known to the government than any other. We need hardly be surprised, therefore, to find that the military operations in this county were all over in ten days or fortnight, when those who had neither surrendered nor fallen fell back into miethe or canot, or affected a junction with the Wicklow rebels in their mountain fastnesses. Their struggle, though so brief, had been creditable for personal bravery. Attacked by a numerous cavalry and militia under General Wilford, by twenty-five hundred men, chiefly regulars, under General Dundas, and by eight hundred regulars brought up by forced marches from Limerick, under Sir James Duff, they showed qualities which, if well directed, would have established for their possessors a high military reputation. At Monasterravin they were repulsed with loss, the defenders of the town being in part Catholic loyalists under Captain Cassidy. At Rathengan they were more successful, taking and holding the town for several days. At Claim the captors of Prosperus were repulsed, while at Old Kilcullen their associates drove back General Dundas's advance, with the loss of twenty-two regulars, and Captain Erskine killed. Sir James Duff's wanton cruelty and sabering and shooting down an unarmed multitude on the Kurg, won him the warm approval of the extermination party in the capital, while General Wilford and Dundas narrowly escaped being reprimanded for granting a truce to the insurgents under Almer, and accepting of the surrender of that leader and his companions. By the beginning of June the six killed-air encampments of insurgents were totally dispersed, and their most active officers in prison, or fugitives, west or south. By a preconcerted arrangement the local chiefs of the insurrection in Dublin and Mieth gathered with their men on the third day after the outbreak at the historic hill of Tara. Here they expected to be joined by the men of Coven, Longford, Louth, and Monaghan, but before the Northerners reached the tristing-place, three companies of the rey-fensibles, under Captain McLean, the Kells and Navin-Yomenry, under Captain Preston, afterwards Lord Tara, and a troop of cavalry under Lord Fingle, surrounded the royal hill. The insurgents, commanded by Gilshine and other leaders, entrenched themselves in the graveyard which occupied the summit of Tara, and stoutly defended their position. Twenty-six of the Highlanders and six of the Yomenry fell in the assault, but the bullet reached farther than the pike, and the defenders were driven, after a sharp action, over the brow of the eminence, and many of them shot or sabred down as they fled. Southward from the capital the long pent-up flame of disaffection broke out on the same memorable day, May 23. At Dunlavin an abortive attempt on the barrack revealed the fact that many of the Yomenry were thoroughly with the insurgents. Only had the danger from without passed over when a military inquiry was improvised. By this tribunal, nineteen Wexford and nine Kildare Yomenry were ordered to be shot, and the execution of the sentence followed immediately on its rending. At Blessington the town was seized, but a nocturnal attack on Carlow was repulsed with great loss. In this last affair the rebels had rendezvoused in the domain of Sir Edward Crosby, within two miles of the town. Their arms were distributed in orders given by their leader, named Roche. Silently and quickly they reached the town they hoped to surprise. But the regular troops, of which the garrison which chiefly composed, were on the alert, though their preparations were made full as silently. When the peasantry emerged from Tullo Street into an exposed space, a deadly fire was opened up upon them from the houses on all sides. The regulars, in perfect security themselves, and abundantly supplied with ammunition, shot them down with deadly unerring aim. The people soon found there was nothing for it but retreat, and carrying off as best they could, their killed and wounded, they retired sorely disconfited. For alleged complicity in this attack Sir Edward Crosby was shortly afterward arrested, tried, and executed. There was not a shadow of proof against him, but he was known to sympathize with the sufferings of his countrymen, to have condemned in strong language the policy of provocation and that was sufficient. He paid with the penalty of his head for the kindness and generosity of his heart. CHAPTER XVI. PART I. OF POPULAR HISTORY OF IRELAND. BOOK XI. BY TAMAN STARCY MAGUI. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. THE INSURRECTION OF 1798. THE WEXFORD INSURRECTION. The most formidable insurrection, indeed the only really formidable one, broke out in the county of Wexford, a county in which it was stated there were not two hundred sworn United Irishmen, and which Lord Edward Fitzgerald had altogether omitted from his official list of counties organized in the month of February. In that brief interval the government policy of provocation had the desired effect, though the explosion was of a nature to startle those who occasioned it. Wexford, geographically, is a peculiar county, and its people are a peculiar people. The county fills up the southeastern corner of the island, with the sea southeast, the river Barrow to the west, and the woods and mountains of Carlow and Wicklow to the north. It is about forty miles long by twenty-four broad, the surface undulating and rising into numerous groups of detached hills, two or more of which are generally visible from each conspicuous summit. First in the midst flows the river Slaney, springing from a lofty Wicklow peak, which sends down on its northern slope the better-known river Liffey. On the estuary of the Slaney, some seventy miles south of Dublin, stands the county town, the traveler journeying to which, by the usual route, then taken, passed in secession through Arklow, Gorry, Ferns, Innisfurthy, and other places of less consequence, though familiar enough in the fiery records of seventeen ninety-eight. North-westward, the only road in those days from Carlow to Kilkenny, crossed the black stairs at Scullag Gap, entering the county at Newtonbury, the ancient Bun-Claude, westward, some twenty miles on the river Barrow, stands New Ross, often mentioned in this history, the road from which to the county town passes through Scullabug and Tullman, Tommen, the former at the foot of Carrickburn Rock, the latter at the base of what is rather hyperbolically called the Mountain of Fourth. South and west of the town, towards the estuary of Waterford, lie the baronies of Forth and Bargy, a great part of the population of which, even within our own time, spoke the language Chaucer and Spencer Road, and retained many of the characteristics of their Saxon, Flemish, and Cambrian ancestors. Through this singular district lay the road towards Duncanon Fort, on Waterford Harbor, with branches running off to Banlow, Ballyhack, and Dunbrody. We shall therefore speak of all the localities we may have occasion to mention as on or near one of the four main roads of the county, the Dublin, Carlow, Boss, and Waterford roads. The population of this territory was variously estimated in 1798 at one hundred and fifty, one hundred and eighty, and two hundred thousand. They were generally speaking a comfortable and contented peasantry, for the Wexford landlords were seldom absentees, and the farmers held under them by long leases and reasonable rents. There were in the country few great lords, but there was little poverty and no pauperism. In such a soil the secret societies were almost certain to fail, and if it had not been for the diabolical experiments of Lord Kingsborough's North Cork militia it is very probable that the orderly and thrifty population would have seen the eventful year we are describing pass over their homes without experiencing any of the terrible trials which accompanied it. But it was impossible for human nature to endure the provocations inflicted upon this patient and prosperous people. The pitch cap and the triangle were resorted to on the slightest and most frivolous pretext. A sergeant of the North Cork militia, says Mr. Haye, the county historian, nicknamed Tom the Devil, was most ingenious in devising new modes of torture. Moist gunpowder was frequently rubbed into the hair, cut loose, and then set on fire. Some, while shearing for this purpose, had the tips of their ears snipped off. Sometimes an entire ear, and often both ears were completely cut off, and many lost part of their noses during the preparation. But strange to tell, as Mr. Haye, these atrocities were publicly practiced without the least reserve in open day, and no magistrate or officer ever interfered, but shamefully connived with this extraordinary mode of quieting the people. Some of the miserable sufferers on these shocking occasions, or some of their relations or friends, actuated by a principle of retaliation, if not of revenge, cut short the hair of several persons whom they either considered as enemies or suspected of having pointed them out as objects for such desperate treatment. This was done with a view that those active citizens should fall in for a little experience of the like discipline, or to make the fashion of short hair so general that it might no longer be a mark of party distinction. This was the origin of the nickname croppy, by which, during the remainder of the insurrection, it was customary to designate all who were suspected or proved to be hostile to the government. Among the magistracy of the county were several persons who, whatever might have been their conduct in ordinary times, now showed themselves utterly unfit to be entrusted with those large discretionary powers which Parliament had recently conferred upon all justices of the peace. One of these magistrates, surrounded by his troops, perambulated the county with an executioner, armed with all the equipment of his office, another carried away the lop tans and fingers of his victims, with which he stirred his punch in the carousels that followed every expedition. At Carnu, midway between the Dublin and Carlow roads, on the second day of the insurrection, twenty-eight prisoners were brought out to be shot as targets in the public ball alley. On the same day Ennis Korthy witnessed its first execution for treason, and the neighborhood of Balakian was harried by Mr. Jacob, one of the magistrates whose method of preserving the peace of the county has been just referred to. The majority of the bench, either weekly or willingly, sanctioned these atrocities, but some others, among them a few of the first men in the county, did not hesitate to resist and to condemn them. Among these were Mr. Beauchamp, Baganel, Harvey of Bargy Castle, Mr. Fitzgerald of New Park, and Mr. John Henry Kulklau of Tinternaby. But all these gentlemen were arrested on Saturday the twenty-sixth of May, the same day, or more strictly speaking, the eve of the day on which the Wexford outbreak occurred. On the day succeeding these arrests, being Whitsunday, Father John Murphy, parish priest of Kilkormick, the son of a small farmer of the neighborhood, educated in Spain, on coming to his little wayside chapel, found it laid in ashes. To his flock, as they surrounded him in the open air, he boldly preached that it would be much better for them to die in a fair field than to await the tortures inflicted by such magistrates as Archibald Jacob, Hunter Gowan, and Haughtry White. He declared his readiness to share their fate, whatever it might be, and in response, about two thousand of the country people gathered in a few hours upon Ullard Hill, situated about halfway between Inesgorthy and the Sea, and eleven miles north of Wexford. Here they were attacked on the afternoon of the same day by the North Cork militia, Colonel Foote, the Chalmalier-Yoman cavalry, Colonel LaHunt, and the Wexford cavalry. The rebels, strong in their position and more generally accustomed to the use of arms than persons in their condition in other parts of the country, made a brave and successful stand. Major Lambert, the honorable Captain de Corsi, brother of Lord Kinsell, and some other officers fell before the longshore guns of the Chalmalier-Fowlers of the North Cork detachment, only the Colonel, a sergeant, and two or three privates escaped. The cavalry at the top of their speed galloped back to the county town. The people were soon thoroughly aroused. Another popular priest of the diocese, Michael Murphy, on reaching Gory, finding his chapel also rifled and the altar desecrated, turned his horse's head and joined the insurgents, who had gathered on Kilthomas Hill, near Carnu. Signal fires burned that night on all the eminences of the county, which seemed as if they had been designed for so many watchtowers. Horns resounded, horsemen galloped far and near. On the morrow of Whitsunday all Wexford rose, animated with the passions and purposes of civil war. On the twenty-eighth, ferns, Camillinen, and Escorthey were taken by the insurgents, the latter after an action of four hours in which a captain, two lieutenants, and eighty of the local yeomanry fell. The survivors fled to Wexford, which was as rapidly as possible placed in a state of defense. The old walls and gates were still in good repair, and three hundred North Cork, two hundred Donogal, and seven hundred local militia, ought to have formed a strong garrison within such ramparts against a mere tumultuous peasantry. The yeoman, however, thought otherwise, and two or three of the imprisoned popular magistrates were sent to Enescorthy to exhort and endeavor to disperse the insurgents. One of them only returned. The other, Mr. Fitzgerald, joined the rebels, who, continuing their march, were allowed to take possession of the county town without striking a blow. Mr. Baganal Harvey, the magistrate still in prison, they insisted on making their commander-in-cheat, a gentleman of considerable property by no means destitute of courage, but in every other respect quite unequal to the task imposed upon him. After a trial of his generalship at the Battle of Ross, he was transferred to the more Pacific office of President of the Council, which continued to sit in direct operations from Wexford, with the co-operation of a subcommittee at Enescorthy. Captain Matthew Keough, a retired officer of the regular army, aged but active, was made governor of the town, in which a couple of hundred armed men were left as his guards. An attempt to relieve the place from Dunn Cannon had utterly failed. General Fawcett, commanding that important fortress, set out on his march with this object in the thirtieth of May, his advanced guard of seventy methion yeomanry, having in charge three howitzers, whose slower movements it was expected the main force would overtake, long before reaching the neighborhood of danger. At Tagman this force was joined by Captain Adams with his command, and thus reinforced they continued their march to Wexford. Within three miles of the town, the road wound round the base of the Three Rock Mountain. Evening fell as the royalist approached this neighborhood, where the victors of Ulart, Enescorthy, and Wexford had just improvised a new camp. A sharp volley from the Longshoreman's guns, and a furious onslaught of pikes threw the royal detachment into the utmost disorder. Three officers of the methion cavalry, and nearly one hundred men were placed o'er to combat. The Three Howitzers, eleven gunners and several prisoners taken, making the third considerable success of the insurgents within a week. Wexford County now became the theater of operations on which all eyes were fixed. The populists gathered, as if by instinct, into three great encampments, on Vinegar Hill, above Enescorthy, on Carrick Byrne, on the road leading to Ross, and on the hill of Cora Grua, seven miles from Gory. The principal leaders of the First Division were Fathers Currence and Clinch, and Messers Fitzgerald, Doyle and Redmond, of the Second, Baganal Harvey, and Father Philip Roche, of the last, Anthony Perry of Inch, Esmond Kean, and the two Fathers Murphy, Michael and John. The general plan of operations was that the Third Division should move by way of Arklow and Wicklow on the capital, the Second to open communication with Carlo, Kilkenny, and Kildare by Newtonbury, and Sculloch Gatt, while the First was to attack new Ross, and endeavour to hasten the rising and Munster. On the first of June, the advance of the Northern Division marching upon Gory, then occupied in force by General Loftus, were encountered four miles from the town, and driven back with the loss of about a hundred killed and wounded. On the fourth of June, Loftus, at the instance of Colonel Walpole, aid to camp to the Lord Lieutenant, who had lately joined him with considerable reinforcements, resolved to beat up the rebel quarters at Cora Grua. It was to be a combined movement. Richard Ancrum, posted with his militia under grooms at the bridge of Scaramalch, where the poetic Banna joins the slainy, was to prevent the arrival of suckers from Vinegar Hill. Captain McManus, with a couple of companies of Yeomanry, stationed at another exposed point from which intelligence could be obtained and excommunicated, while the general and Colonel Walpole marched to the attack by road some distance apart, which ran into one within two miles of Cora Grua camp. The main body of the king's troops were committed to the lead of Walpole, who had also two six-pounders and a howitzer. After an hour and a half's march he found the country changed its character near the village of Clough, where the road, descending from the level arable land, dipped suddenly into the narrow and winding pass of Tiberneering. The sides of the pass were lined with a bushy shrubbery, and the road way at the bottom and banked with ditch and dyke. On came the confident Walpole, never dreaming that these silent thickets were soon to re-echo the cries of the onslaught. The fourth Dragoon guards, the ancient Britons, under Sir Wat can win, the antramolisha under Colonel Cope, had all entered the defile before the ambuscade was discovered. Then at the first folly, Walpole fell, with several of those immediately about his person. Out from the shrubbery rushed the pikemen, clearing ditch and dyke at a bound. Dragoons and fensibles went down like the sword before the scythe of the mower. The three guns were captured and turned on the flying survivors, their regimental flags taken with all the other spoils pertaining to such a retreat. It was, in truth, an immense victory for a mob of peasants, marshalled by men who that day saw their first or at most their second action. Before forty-eight hours they were masters of gory and talked of nothing less than the capture of Dublin within another week or fortnight. From Vinegar Hill the concerted movement was made against Newtonbury. On the second of June the rebels advancing by both banks of the slainy, under cover of a six-pounder, the only gun they had with them. The detachment and command of the beautiful little town, half-hidden in its leafy valley, was from six hundred to eight hundred strong, with a troop of Dragoons and two battalion guns, under command of Colonel Estrange. These, after a sharp fuselad on both sides, were driven out, but the assailants, instead of following up the blow, dispersed for plunder or refreshment, were attacked in turn and compelled to retreat, with a reported loss of four hundred killed. Three days later, however, a still more important action, and a yet more disastrous repulse from the self-same cause, took place at New Ross on the Barrow. The garrison of Ross, on the morning of the fifth of June, when General Harvey appeared before it, consisted of fourteen hundred men, Dublin, Mieth, Donegal, and Clare Militia, mid Lothian Fensibles, and English artillery. General Johnson, a veteran soldier, was in command, and the place, strong in its well-preserved old walls, had not heard a shot fired in anger since the time of Cromwell. Harvey was reported to have with him twenty thousand men, but if we allow for the exaggeration of numbers common to all such movements, we may perhaps deduct one half, and still leave him at the head of a formidable force, ten thousand men, with three field-pieces. Mr. Furlong, a favorite officer, being sent forward to summon the town, was shot down by a sentinel, and the attack began. The main point of assault was the gate known as Three-Bullet Gate, and the hour, five o'clock, of the lovely summer's morning. The obstinacy with which the town was contested may be judged from the fact that the fighting continued for nearly ten hours, with the interruption of an hour or two at noon. This was the fatal interruption for the rebels. They had at a heavy cost driven out the royalists, with the loss of a colonel, Lord Mountjoy, three captains, and above two hundred men killed, but of their friends and comrades treble the number had fallen. Still, the town, an object of the first importance, was theirs. When worn out with heat, fatigue, and fasting since sunrise, they indulged themselves in the luxury of a deep and unmeasured carouse. The fugitive garrison, finding themselves un-pursued, halted to breathe on the Kilkenny bank of the river, were rallied by the veteran Johnson, and led back again across the bridge, taking the surprised revelers completely unprepared. A cry was raised that this was a fresh force from Waterford, the disorganized multitude endeavored to rally in turn, but before the leaders could collect their men, the town was once more in possession of the bank's troops. The rebels in their turn, un-pursued by their exhausted enemies, fell back upon their camping-ground of the night before, at Corbett Hill and Sleeve Kilter. At the latter, Father Philip Roche, dissatisfied with Harvey's management, established a separate command, which he transferred to a layman of his own name, Edward Roche, with whom he continued to act and advise during the remainder of this memorable month. CHAPTER XVI. PART I. Red by Cibela Denton. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org.