 A Popular History of Ireland from the Earliest Period to the Emancipation of the Catholics, Book 10, by Thomas Darcy McGee. A Popular History of Ireland from the Earliest Period to the Emancipation of the Catholics, Book 10, from the Restoration of Charles II to the Assession of George I, by Thomas Darcy McGee. CHAPTER I. RAIN OF CHARLES II. Hope is dear to the heart of man, and of all her votaries none have been more constant than the Irish. Half a century of the stewards had not extinguished their blind partiality for the descendants of the old Scotto-Irish kings. The restoration of that royal house was, therefore, an event which penetrated to the remotest wilds of Connaught, lighting up with cheering expectation the most desolate hovels of the prescribed. To the Puritans settled in Ireland, most of whom, from the mean condition of menial servants, common soldiers and subaltern officers, had become rich proprietors, the same tidings brought apprehension and alarm. But their leaders, the Protestant gentry of an earlier date, wealthy, astute, and energetic, leading all their influence for the common protection, turned this event, which seemed at one time to threaten their ruin, to their advantage in greater security. The chief of these greater leaders was the accomplished Lord Broghill, whom we are to know during this reign under his more famous title of Earl of Ororary. The position of the Irish as compared with the English Puritans was essentially different in the eyes of Orman, Clarendon, and the other councillors of the king. Though the former represented dissent as against the Church, they also represented the English as against the Irish interest in Ireland. As dissenters they were disliked and ridiculed, but as colonists they could not be disturbed. When national antipathy was placed in one scale and religious animosity in the other, the intensely national feeling of England for the Cromwellians, as Englishmen settled in a hostile country, prevailed over every other consideration. Given this, as in all other conjectures, it has been the singular infelicity of the one Ireland to be subjected to a policy directly opposite to that pursued in the other. While in England it was considered wise and just to break down the Puritans as a party, through the court, the pulpit, and the press, to drive the violent into exile and to win the lukewarm to conformity. In Ireland it was decided to confirm them in their possessions, to leave the government of the kingdom in their hands, and to strengthen their position by the acts of settlement and explanation. These acts were hailed as the Magna Carta of Irish Protestantism, but so far as the vast majority of the people were concerned, they were as cruelly unjust as the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, or the Edicts which banished the Moors and Jews from the Spanish Peninsula. The struggle for possession of the soil inaugurated by the confiscations of Elizabeth and James was continued against great odds by the Catholic Irish throughout this reign. Though the royal declaration of Breda, which preceded the restoration, had not mentioned them expressly, they still claimed under it not only the liberty to tender consciences, but that just satisfaction to those unfairly deprived of their estates, promised in that declaration. Accordingly, several of the old gentry returned from Canot, or places abroad, took possession of their old homes, or made their way at once to Dublin or London, to urge their claims to their former estates. To their dismay they found in Dublin, Coot and Broghill established as Lord Justices, and the new Parliament, the first that sat for twenty years, composed of an overwhelming majority of undertakers, adventurers, and Puritan representatives of boroughs from which all the Catholic electors had been long excluded. The Protestant interest, or ascendancy party, as it now began to be commonly called, counted in the Commons one hundred and ninety-eight members to sixty-four Catholics, in the House of Lords seventy-two Protestants to twenty-one Catholic peers. The former elected Sir Oddly Mervyn, their speaker, and the able but curiously intricate and quaint discourses of the ancient colleague of Kerry and Darcy in the assertion of Irish legislative independence, shows how different was the spirit of Irish Protestantism in sixteen-sixty-one, as compared with sixteen-forty-one. The lords chose Bramhall, the long-exiled Bishop of Derry, now Archbishop of Armagh, as their speaker, and attempted to compel their members to take the sacrament according to the Anglican ritual. The majority of both houses, to secure the Goodwill of Armand, voted him the sum of thirty thousand pounds, and then proceeded to consider the Bill of Settlement in relation to landed property. The Catholic Bar, which had been apparently restored to its freedom, presented a striking array of talent, from which their co-religionists selected those by whom they desired to be heard at the Bar of the House. The venerable Darcy and the accomplished Belling were no longer their oracles of the law, but they had the services of Sir Nicholas Plunkett, an old confederate of Sir Richard Nagel, author of the famous Coventry Letter, of Nugent, afterwards Lord Riverston, and other able men. In the House of Lords they had an intrepid ally in the Earl of Kildare, and in England, an agent equally intrepid, in Colonel Richard Talbot, afterwards Earl of Tirkanal. The diplomatic and parliamentary struggle between the two interests, the disinherited and the new proprietary, was too protracted, and the details are too involved for elucidation in every part, but the result tells its own story. In 1675, in the fifteenth year of the Restoration, the new settlers possessed above four and a half million acres, to about two million two hundred and fifty thousand still retained by the old owners. These relative proportions were exactly the reverse of those existing before the Cromwellian settlement. A single generation had seen this great revolution accomplished in landed property. The Irish Parliament, having sent over to England the heads of their bill, according to the Constitutional Rule established by Poinings Act, the Irish Catholics sent over Sir Nicholas Plunkett to obtain modifications of its provisions. But Plunkett was met in England with such an outcry from the mob and the press, as to the alleged atrocities of the Confederate War, and his own former negotiations on the Continent, that he was unable to affect anything, while Colonel Talbot, for his two warm expostulations with Ormond, was sent to the Tower. In order of counsel, forbidding Plunkett the presence, and declaring that no petition or further address be made from the Roman Catholics of Ireland as to the Bill of Settlement, closed the controversy, and the act soon after received the royal assent. Under this act a court was established at Dublin to try the claims of no-scent and innocent. Notwithstanding every influence which could be brought to bear on them, the judges, who were Englishmen, declared in their first session one hundred and sixty-eight innocent to nineteen no-scent. Proceeding in this spirit to the great loss and dissatisfaction of the Protestants, the latter, greatly alarmed, procured the interference of Ormond, now Lord Lieutenant, sixteen sixty-two, in effecting a modification of the commission, appointing the court, by which its duration was limited to an early day. The consequence was that while less than eight hundred claims were decided on when the fateful day arrived, over three thousand were left unheard, at least a third of whom were admitted even by their enemies to be innocent. About five hundred others had been restored by name in the act of settlement itself, but by the act of explanation, sixteen sixty-five, no papest who had not been a judged innocent under the former act could be so adjudged thereafter, or entitled to claim any lands or settlements. Thus even the inheritance of hope, and the reversion of expectation, were extinguished forever for the sons and daughters of the ancient gentry of the kingdom. The religious liberties of this people, so crippled in property and political power, were equally at the mercy of the mob and of the monarch. To combat the war of Calumni, waged against them by the Puritan press and the pulpit, the leading Catholics resolved to join in an official and authentic declaration of their true principles, as to the spiritual power of the Pope, their allegiance to the Prince, and their relations to their fellow subjects of other denominations. With this intention a meeting was held at the house of the Marquis of Clan-Recard in Dublin, at which lords Clan-Cardy, Carlingford, Fingle, Castlehaven, and Inchican, and the leading commoners of their faith were present. At this meeting father Peter Walsh, a Franciscan, and an old courtier of four mons, as procurator of all the clergy of Ireland, secular and regular, produced credentials signed by the surviving bishops or their vickers, including the primate O'Reilly, the bishops of Mieth, Ardog, Kilmore, and Ferns. Richard Belling, the secretary to the First Confederate Council, and Envoy to Rome, submitted the celebrated document known as the Remonstrance, deeply imbued with the spirit of the Gallican Church of that day. It was signed by about seventy Catholic peers and commoners, by the bishop of Kilmore, by procurator Walsh, and by the townsmen of Wexford, almost the only urban community of Catholics remaining in the country. But the propositions it contained as to the total independency of the temporal, on the spiritual power, and the ecclesiastical patronage of princes, were condemned at the Sorbonne, at Louvain, and at Rome. The regular orders by their several superiors utterly rejected it. The exiled bishops withdrew their proxies from Father Walsh, and disclaimed his conduct. The internuncio at Brussels, charged with the affairs of the British Isles, denounced it as contrary to the cannons, and the elated procurator found himself involved in a controversy, from which he never afterwards escaped, and with which his memory is still angrily associated. The conduct of Ormond, in relation to this whole business of the Remonstrance, was the least creditable part of his administration, writhing under the eloquent pamphlets of the exiled bishop of Ferns, keenly remembering his own personal wrongs against the former generation of bishops, of whom but three or four were yet living, he resolved to work that division among the Romish clergy, which he had long meditated. With this view he connived at a regular meeting of the surviving prelates and the superiors of regular orders, at Dublin, in 1666. To this synod safe conduct was permitted to the primate O'Reilly, banished to Belgium nine years before, to Peter Talbot, Archbishop of Dublin, John Burke, Archbishop of Tom, Patrick Plunkett, Bishop of Ardog, the vicar's general of other prelates, and the superiors of the regulars. This venerable body deliberated anxiously for an entire week, Father Walsh acting as ambassador between them and the viceroy. At length, in spite of all politic considerations, they unanimously rejected the servile doctrine of the remonstrance, substituting instead a declaration of their own dictation. Ormond now cast off all affection of liberality. Primate O'Reilly was sent back to his vanishment, the other prelates and clergy were driven back to their hiding places, or into exile abroad, and the wise, experienced, high-spirited Duke did not hesitate to avail himself of the Popish plot mania, which soon after broke out, to avenge himself upon an order of men whom he could neither break nor bend to his purposes. Of eleven hundred secular priests and seven hundred and fifty regulars still left, only sixty-nine had signed the Clan Ricard House remonstrance. An incident of this same year, sixteen-sixty-six, illustrates more forcibly than description could do the malignant feeling which had been excited in England against everything Irish. The importation of Irish cattle had long been considered an English grievance. It was now declared by law a nuisance. The occasion taken to pass this statute was as ungracious as the act itself was despicable. In consequence of the great fire, which still glows for us in the immortal verse of Dryden, the Irish had sent over to the distressed a contribution of fifteen thousand bullets. This was considered by the generous recipients a mere pretense to preserve the trade in cattle between the two kingdoms, and accordingly both houses, after some sharp resistance in the lords, gravely enacted that the importation of Irish beef into England was a nuisance to be abated. From this period most probably dates the famous English sarcasm against Irish bulls. The act prohibiting the export of cattle from Ireland, and the equally exclusive and unjust navigation act, originally devised by Cromwell, so paralyzed every Irish industry that the Puritan party became almost as dissatisfied as the Catholics. They maintained a close correspondence with their brethren in England, and began to speculate on the possibilities of another revolution. Ormond, to satisfy their demands, distributed twenty thousand stand of arms among them, and reviewed the Lentster Militia on the Kirag in 1667. The next year he was recalled, and lords Robarts, Berkeley, and Essex successively appointed to the government. The first a Puritan, and almost a Regicide, held office but a few months. The second a Cavalier and a friend of toleration for two years, while Essex, one of those fair-minded but yielding characters, known in the next reign as Trimmers, petitioned for his own recall in Ormond's restoration in 1676. The only events which marked these last nine years, from Ormond's removal till his reappointment, were the surprise of Karak Furgus by a party of unpaid soldiers, and their desperate defence of that ancient stronghold, the embassies to and from the Irish Catholics and the court, of Colonel Richard Talbot, and the establishment of extensive woolen manufactories at Thomastown, Callan, and Kilkenny, under the patronage of Ormond. CHAPTER II. RAIN OF CHARLES II. For the third time the aged Ormond, now arrived at the period usually allotted to the life of man, returned to Ireland with the rank of viceroy. During the ensuing seven years he clung to power with all the tenacity of his youth, and all the policy of his prime. They were seven years of extraordinary sectarian panic and excitement. The years of the cabal, the Popesh Plot, and the Exclusion Bill in England, and of fanatical conspiracies and explosions almost as dangerous in Ireland. The Popesh Plot mania held possession of the English people much longer than any other moral epidemic of equal virulence. In the month of October 1678, its alleged existence in Ireland was communicated to Ormond. In July 1681 its most illustrious victim, Archbishop Plunkett, perished on the scaffold at Tibern. Within these two points of time what a chronicle of madness, folly, perjury, and cruelty might be written. Ormond, too old in statecraft to believe in the existence of these incredible plots, was also too aware of the dangerous element of fanaticism represented by Titus Oates and his imitators to subject himself to suspicion. On the first intelligence of the plot he instantly issued his proclamation for the arrest of Archbishop Talbot of Dublin, who had been permitted to return from exile under the rule of Lord Berkeley, and had since resided with his brother, Colonel Talbot, at Car-Town near Maynooth. This prelate was of Ormond's own age, and of a family as agent, while his learning, courage, and morality made him an ornament to his order. He was seized in his sick-bed at Car-Town, carried to Dublin in a chair, and confined a close prisoner in the castle, where he died two years later. He was the last distinguished captive destined to end his days in that celebrated state prison, which has since been generally dedicated to the peaceful purposes of reflected royalty. Colonel Talbot was at the same time arrested, but allowed to retire beyond seas. Lord Mount Garrett, an octogenarian and in his dotage, was seized, but nothing could be made out against him. A Colonel Peppard was also denounced from England, but no such person was found to exist. So far the first year of the plot had passed over, and proved nothing against the Catholic Irish. But the example of successful villainy in England, of oaths idolized, penchant and all-powerful, extended to the sister kingdom, and brought an illustrious victim to the scaffold. This was Oliver Plunkett, a scion of the noble family of Fingall, who had been archbishop of Armagh since the death of Dr. O'Reilly in exile in 1669. Such had been the prudence and circumspection of Dr. Plunkett during his perilous administration that the agents of Lord Shaftesbury, sent over to concoct evidence for the occasion, were afraid to bring him to trial in the vincenage of his arrest, or in his own country. Accordingly, they caused him to be removed from Dublin to London, contrary to the laws and customs of both kingdoms, which had first been violated toward state prisoners in the case of Lord Maguire forty years before. Dr. Plunkett, after ten months' confinement without trial in Ireland, was removed in 1680 and arraigned at London on the 8th of June 1681, without having had permission to communicate with his friends or to send for witnesses. The prosecution was conducted by Maynard and Jeffries in violation of every form of law and every consideration of justice. A crown agent, whose name is given as Gorman, was introduced by a stranger in court and volunteered testimony in his favour. The Earl of Essex interceded with the King on his behalf, but Charles answered, almost in the words of Pilate, I cannot pardon him because I dare not. His blood be upon your conscience. You could have saved him, if you pleased. The jury, after a quarter of an hour's deliberation, brought in their verdict of guilty, and the brutal Chief Justice condemned him to be hung, embelled, and quartered on the first day of July 1681. The venerable martyr, for such he may well be called, bowed his head to the bench and exclaimed, Deogratius! Eight years from the very day of his execution, on the banks of that river beside which he had been seized and dragged from his retreat, the last of the Stuart Kings was stricken from his throne, and his dynasty stricken from history. Was not the blood of the innocent cry to heaven for vengeance? The charges against Dr. Plunkett were that he maintained treasonable correspondence with France and Rome, and the Irish on the continent, that he had organised insurrection in Laos, Monaghan, Cavern, and Armog, that he made preparations for the landing of a French force at Carlingford, and that he had held several meetings to raise men for these purposes. Utterly absurd and false as these charges were, they still indicate the troubled apprehensions which filled the dreams of the ascendancy party. The fear of French invasion, of new insurrections, of the redemption of estates haunted them by night and day. Every sign was to them significant of danger, and every rumour of conspiracy was taken for fact. The report of a strange fleet off the southern coast, which turned out to be English, threw them all into panic, and the corpus Christi crosses which the peasantry affixed to their doors were nothing but signs for the papus destroyer to pass by, and to spare his fellows and the general massacre of Protestants. Under the pressure of these panics, real or pretended, proclamation after proclamation issued from the castle. By one of these instruments, Ormond prohibited Catholics from entering the castle of Dublin, or any other fortress, from holding fares or markets within the walls of corporate towns, and from carrying arms to such resorts. By another he declared all relatives of known Tories, a Gaelic term for a driver of prey, to be arrested, and banished from the kingdom within fourteen days unless such Tories were killed or surrendered within that time. Where this device failed to reach the destined victims, as in the celebrated case of Count Redmond O'Hanlon, it is to be feared that he did not hesitate to wet the dagger of the assassin, which was still sometimes employed, even in the British islands, to remove a dangerous antagonist. Count O'Hanlon, a gentleman of ancient lineage, as accomplished as Orory, or Ossary, was indeed an outlaw to the code then in force, but the stain of his cowardly assassination must forever blot and rot the princely escutcheons of James, Duke of Ormond. The violence of religion and social persecution began to subside during the last two or three years of Charles II. Monmouth's banishment, Shaftesbury's imprisonment, the execution of Russell and Sidney on the scaffold, marked the return of the English public mind to political pursuits and objects. Early in 1685, the king was taken mortally ill. In his last moments he received the rights of the Catholic Church from the hands of Father Huddleston, who was said to have saved his life at the Battle of Worcester, and who was now even more anxious to save his soul. This event took place on the 16th of February. King James was immediately proclaimed successor to his brother. One of his first acts was to recall Ormond from Ireland and appoint in his place the Earl of Clarendon, son of the historian and statesman of the Restoration. Ormond obeyed, not without regret. He survived his fall about three years. He was interred in Westminster in 1688, three months before the landing of William and the second banishment of the stewards. CHAPTER III Before plunging into the troubled current of the Revolution of 1688, let us cast a glance back on the century, and consider the state of learning and religion during those three generations. If we divide the Irish literature of this century by subjects, we shall find extant of respectable body, both in quantity and quality, of theology, history, law, politics, and poetry. If we divide it by the languages in which that literature was written, we may consider it as Latin, Gaelic, and English. ONE Latin continued throughout Europe, even till this late day, the language of the learned, but especially of theologists, jurists, and historians. In Latin, the great tomes of O'Sullivan, Usher, Colgan, Wadding, and White were written, volumes which remain as so many monuments of the learning and industry of that age. The chief objects of these illustrious writers were, to restore the ancient ecclesiastical history of Ireland, to rescue the memory of her saints and doctors from oblivion, and to introduce the native annals of the kingdom to the attention of Europe. Though Usher differed in religion, and in his theory of the early connection of the Irish with the Roman Church, from all the rest, yet he stands preeminent among them for labour and research. The Waterford-Franciscan, Wadding, can only be named with him for inexhaustible patience, various learning, and untiring zeal. Both were honoured of princes and parliaments. The Confederates would have made Wadding a cardinal. King James made Usher an archbishop. One instructed the Westminster Assembly, the other was sent by the King of Spain to maintain the thesis of the Immaculate Conception at Rome, and subsequently was entrusted by the Pope to report upon the propositions of Jensenius. O'Sullivan, Condé de Berhaven in Spain, and Peter White, have left us each two or three Latin volumes on the history of the country, highly prized by all subsequent writers. But the most indispensable of the legacies left us in this tongue are Colgan's Acta Sanctorum, from January to March, and Dr. John Lynch's Cambrensis Evarsus. Many other works and authors might be mentioned, but these are the great Latinists to whom we are indebted for the most important services rendered to our national history. 2. In the Gaelic literature of the country we count Jeffrey Keating, Rod McFerbys, and the Four Masters of Donicle. Few writers have been more rashly judged than Keating. A poet, as well as a historian, he gave a prominence in the early chapters of his history to Bartic tales, which English critics have seized upon to damage his reputation for truthfulness and good cause. But these tales he gives as tales, as curious and illustrative, rather than as creditable and unquestionable. The purity of his style is greatly extolled by Gaelic critics, and the interest of his narrative, even in a translation, is undoubted. McFerbys, an analyst and genealogist by inheritance, is known to us not only for his profound native lore and tragic death, but also for the assistance he rendered Sir James Ware, Dr. Lynch, and Roderick O'Flaherty. The masterpiece, however, of our Gaelic literature of this age is the work now called the Annals of the Four Masters. In the reign of James I, a few Franciscan friars, living partly in Donegal Abbey and partly in St. Anthony's College at Leuven, undertook to collect and collate all the manuscript remains of Irish antiquity they could gather or borrow, or be allowed to copy. Father Hugh Ward was the head of this group, and by him the lay brother, Michael O'Claire, one of the greatest benefactors his country ever saw, was sent from Belgium to Ireland. From 1620 to 1630 O'Claire traveled through the kingdom, buying or transcribing everything he could find relating to the lives of the Irish saints, which he sent to Leuven, where Ward and Colgan undertook to edit and illustrate them. Father Ward died in the early part of the undertaking, but Father Colgan spent twenty years in prosecuting the original design, so far as concerned our ecclesiastical biography. After collecting these materials, Father O'Claire waited, as he tells us, on the noble Ferkel O'Gara, one of the two knights elected to represent the county of Sligo in the parliament of 1634, and perceiving the anxiety of O'Gara from the cloud which at present hangs over our ancient Malaysian race, he proposed to collect the civil and military annals of Aaron into one large digest. O'Gara, struck with this proposal, freely supplied the means, and O'Claire and his co-ajuders set to work in the Franciscan convent of Donegal, which still stood, not more than half in ruins. On the twenty-second of January 1632 they commenced this digest, and on the tenth of August 1636 it was finished, having occupied them four years, seven months, and nineteen days. The manuscript, dedicated to O'Gara, is authenticated by the superiors of the convent. From that original two editions have been recently printed in both languages. These annals extend to the year 1616, the time of the compilers. Originally they bore the title of Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland, but Colgan, having quoted them as the annals of the Four Masters, that name remains ever since. The Four Masters were brother Michael O'Claire, Connery and Peregrino Clare, his brothers, both laymen and natives of Donegal, and Florence Conroy of Roscommon, another hereditary antiquary. The first edition of the New Testament, in the Gaelic tongue, so far as we are aware, appeared at Dublin in 1603 in Courtauld. The translation was the work of a native scholar, O'Kianga, Anglicised King. It was made at the expense and under the supervision of Dr. William O'Donnell, one of the first Fellows of Trinity, and published at the cost of the people of Connaught. Dr. O'Donnell, an amiable man, and an enemy of persecution, came subsequently Archbishop of Tuam, in which dignity he died in 1628. A translation of the Book of Common Prayer by O'Donnell appeared early in the century, and towards its close, 1685, a translation of the Old Testament, made for Bishop Betel by the Gaelic scholars of Mieheth and Cavann, was published at the expense of the famous Robert Boyle. Betel had also caused, to be published, Gaelic translations of certain homilies of St. Leo and St. John Chrysostom, on the importance of studying the Holy Scriptures. The only other Gaelic publications of this period were issued from the Irish colleges at Leuven and Rome. Thence issued the devotional tracts of Conroy, of Guernon and O'Malley, and the Irish grammars of Eau Clairey and Stapleton. The devotional tracts, with their fanciful titles of lamps and mirrors, were smuggled across from Ostend and Duncork, with other articles of contraband, and did much to keep alive the flame of faith and hope in the hearts of the Gaelic speaking population. The bardic order also, though shorn of much of their ancient splendor, and under the Puritan regime persecuted as vagrants, still flourished as an estate of the realm. The national tendency to poetic writing was not confined to the hereditary verse-makers, but was illustrated by such men as the martyred Plunkett, and the bishops of Mieth and Kerry, Dr. Thomas Dease, and Dr. John O'Connell. But the great body of Gaelic verse of the first half of this century is known under the name of the Contensions of the Bards, the subject being the relative dignity, power, and prowess of the North and South. The gauntlet in this poetic warfare was thrown down by MacDare, the bard of Donog O'Brien, 4th Earl of Thoamond, and taken up on the part of Ulster by Louis O'Clary. Reply led to rejoinder, and one epistle to another, until all the chief bards of the four provinces had taken sides. Half a dozen writers, pro and con, were particularly distinguished, MacDare himself, Terlag O'Brien, and Art Og O'Keefe on behalf of the Southerners, O'Clary, O'Donnell, the two MacEagans, and Robert MacArthur on the side of the North. An immense mass of devotional Gaelic poetry may be traced to this period. The religious wars, the calamities of the church and of the people, inspired many a priest and layman to seize the harp of David, and pour forth his hopes and griefs in sacred song. The lament of MacWard over the Ulster princes buried at Rome, the oads of Dermott Conroy and Flann McNamee, in honor of our Blessed Lady, are of this class. Thus it happened that the bardic order, which in ancient times was the formidable enemy of Christianity, became through adversity and affliction its greatest supporter. III Our hiberno-English literature is almost entirely the creation of this century. Except some few remarkable state papers we have no English writings of any reputation of an earlier period. Now, however, when the language of the empire, formed and enriched by the great minds of Elizabeth's era, began to extend its influence at home and abroad, a school of hiberno-English writers appeared, both numerous and distinguished. This school was, as yet, composed mainly of two classes, the dramatic poets and the pamphleteers. Of the latter were Bishop French, Sir Richard Nagel, Sir Richard Belling, Lord Orory, Father Peter Walsh, and William Monew. Of the former, Ludovic Berry, Sir John Denham, the Earl of Roscommon, and Richard Flecknoe, the MacFlecknoe of Dryden. It is true there appeared as yet no supreme name like Swift's, but as indicating the gradual extension of the English language into Ireland, the popular pamphlets and pieces written for the stage are illustrations of our mental life not to be overlooked. Of the ancient schools of the island, after the final suppression of the college at Galway in 1652, not one remained. A diocesan college at Kilkenny and the Dublin University were alone open to the youth of the country. But the university remained exclusively in possession of the Protestant interest, nor did it give to the world during the century except usher, ware, and orory any graduate of national, not to say European, reputation. In the byways of the South and West, in the Irish colleges on the continent of Europe, at Paris, Louvain, Lysel, Salamanca, Lisbon, or Rome, the children of the prescribed majority could alone acquire a degree in learning, human or divine. It was as impossible two centuries to go to speak of Trinity College with respect as it is in our time, remembering all it has done since to speak of it without veneration. Though the established church had now completed its century and a half of existence, it was as far from the hearts of the Irish as ever. Though the amiable battle and the learned O'Donnell had caused the sacred scriptures to be translated into the Gaelic tongue, few converts had been made from the Catholic ranks, while the spirit of animosity was inflamed by a sense of the cruel and undeserved disabilities inflicted in the name of religion. The manifold sex introduced under Cromwell gave a keener edge to Catholic contempt for the doctrines of the Reformation, and although the restoration of the monarchy threw the extreme sectaries into the shade, it added nothing to the influence of the church, except the fatal gift of political patronage. For the first time the high dignity of Archbishop of Armagh began to be regarded as the inheritance of the leader of the House of Lords, then Brahmal and Boyle laid the foundation of that primatial power which bolter and stone upheld under another dynasty, but which vanished before the first dawn of parliamentary independence. In the quarter of a century which elapsed from the restoration to the Revolution, the condition of the Catholic clergy and lady was such as we have already described. In 1662, an historian of the Jesuit missionaries in Ireland described the sufferings of ecclesiastics as deplorable. They were forced to fly to the herds of cattle in remote places, to seek a refuge in barns and stables, or to sleep at night in the porticoes of temples, lest they should endanger the safety of the lady. In that same year Orore advised Orman to purge the walled towns of papists who were still three to one Protestant. In 1672 Sir William Petty computed them at eight to one of the entire population. So captive Israel multiplied in chains. The martyrdom of the Archbishop of Dublin in 1680 and of the Archbishop of Armagh in 1681 were, however, from the last of a series of executions for Conscious's sake, from the relation of which the historian might well have been excused if it was not necessary to remind our emancipated posterity at what price they had been purchased. End of Chapter 3. Read by Cibela Denton. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Chapter 4. Of Popular History of Ireland, Book 10. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Chapter 4. A Session of James II. From the Assession of King James till his final flight from Ireland in July 1690 there elapsed an interval of five years and five months, a period fraught with consequences of the highest interest to this history. The new king was, on his accession, in his 52nd year. He had served as Duke of York with credit both by land and sea, was an avowed Catholic and married to a Catholic princess, the beautiful and unfortunate Mary of Modena. Within a month from the proclamation of the king, Ormond quitted the government for the last time, leaving Primit Boyle and Lord Grenard as justices. In January 1686 Lord Clarendon, son of the historian, assumed the government, in which he continued till the 16th of March 1687. The day following the national anniversary, Colonel Richard Talbot, Earl of Tearconnell, a Catholic, and the former agent for the Catholics, was installed as Lord Deputy. Other events, connecting these with each other, had filled with astonishment and apprehension the ascendancy party. James proceeded openly with what he hoped to make a counter-reformation of England, and to accomplish which he relied on France on the one hand and Ireland on the other. In both cases he alarmed the fears and wounded the pride of England, but when he proceeded from one illegality to another, when he began to exercise a dispensing power above the laws, to instruct the judges to menace the parliament and imprison the bishops, the nobility, the commons, and the army gradually combined against him, and at last invited over the Prince of Orange as the most capable vindicator of their outraged constitution. The head-long king had a representative equally rash in Tearconnell. He was a man old enough to remember well the uprising of 1641, had lived in intimacy with James as Duke of York, was personally brave, well skilled and intrigue, but vain, loud-spoken, confident, and incapable of a high command in military affairs. The colonelcy of an Irish regiment, the Earl of Tearconnell, and a seat in the secret council or cabinet of the king, were honors conferred on him during the year of James's accession. When Clarendon was named Lord Lieutenant at the beginning of 1686, Tearconnell was sent over with him as Lieutenant-General of the army. At his instigation a proclamation was issued that all classes of his majesty's subjects might be allowed to serve in the army, and another that all arms hitherto given out should be deposited for greater security at one of the king's stores provided for the purpose in each town or county. Thus that exclusively Protestant militia, which for twenty years had executed the act of settlement and the act of uniformity in every quarter of the kingdom, found themselves suddenly disarmed, and a new Catholic army rising on their ruins. The numbers disbanded are nowhere stated. They probably amounted to 10,000 or 15,000 men, and very naturally they became warm partisans of the Williamite Revolution. The recriminations which arose between the new and the old militia were not confined to the nicknames Wig and Tory, or to the bandying of sarcasms on each other's origin. Swords were not unfrequently drawn, and muskets discharged, even in the streets of Dublin, under the very walls of the castle. Through Tearconnell's influence a similar revolution had been wrought in the exclusive character of the Courts of Justice, and the corporations of towns, to that which remodeled the militia. Rice, Daley, and Nugent were elevated to the bench during Lord Clarendon's time. The corporation of Dublin, having refused to surrender their exclusive charter, were summarily rejected by a quowaranto issued in the Exchequer. Other towns were similarly treated, or induced to make surrender, and a new series of charters at once granted by James, entitling Catholics to the freedom of the boroughs, and the highest municipal offices. And now, for the first time in that generation, Catholic mayors and sheriffs, escorted by Catholic troops as Guards of Honor, were seen marching in open day to their own places of worship, to the dismay and astonishment of the ascendancy party. Not that all Protestants were excluded either from the town councils, the militia or the bench, but those only were elected or appointed who concurred in the new arrangements, and were therefore pretty certain to forfeit the confidence of their co-religionists in proportion as they deserved that of the deputy. Toppill and Coghill, masters in Chancery, were deprived of their offices, and the Protestant Chancellor was arbitrarily removed to make way for Baron Rice, a Catholic. The exclusive character of Trinity College was next assailed, and though James did not venture to revoke the Charter of Elizabeth, establishing communion with the Church of England as the test of fellowship, the internal administration was in several particulars interfered with. Its plate was seized in the king's name under the plea of being public property, and the annual parliamentary grant of three hundred and eighty-eight pounds was discontinued. These arbitrary acts filled the more judicious Catholics with apprehension, but gained the loud applause of the unreasoning multitude. Dr. Maguire, the successor of the martyred plunkett, who felt in Ulster the rising tide of resistance, was among the signers of a memorial to the king, dutifully remonstrating against the violent proceedings of his deputy. From Rome also, disapprobation was more than once expressed, but all without avail. Neither James nor Talbot could be brought to reason. The Protestants of the eastern and southern towns and counties who could contrive to quit their homes did so. Hundreds fled to Holland to join the ranks of the Prince of Orange. Thousands fled to England, bringing with them their tale of oppression, embellished with all the bitter exaggeration of exiles. Ten thousand removed from Lenster into Ulster, soon to recross the Boine under very different auspices. Very soon a close correspondence was established between the fugitives in Holland, England and Ulster, and a powerful lever was thus placed in the hands of the Prince of Orange to work the downfall of his uncle and father-in-law. But the best allies of William were, after all, the folly and fatuity of James. The importation of Irish troops by entire battalions gave the last and sourced wound to the national pride of England, and still further exasperated the hatred and contempt which his Majesty's English regiments had begun to feel for their royal master. Tyr Connell, during the eventful summer months when the revolution was ripening both in Holland and England, had taken, unknown even to James, a step of the gravest importance. To him the first intelligence of the preparations of William were carried by a ship from Amsterdam, and by him they were communicated to the infatuated king, who had laughed at them as too absurd for serious consideration. But the Irish ruler, fully believing his informants and never deficient in audacity, had at once entered into a secret treaty with Louis XIV to put Ireland under the protection of France in the event of the Prince of Orange succeeding to the British throne. No proposition could more entirely suit the exigencies of Louis, of whom William was by far the ablest and most relentless enemy. The correspondence which has come to light in recent times shows the importance which he attached to Tyr Connell's proposition, and importance still further enhanced by the direct but unsuccessful overture made to the Earl by William himself, on landing in England and before embarking in the actual invasion of Ireland. William Henry, Prince of Orange, now about to enter on the scene, was in 1688 in the thirty-seventh year of his age. Prince of Danger, patient, silent, impervious to his enemies, rather a soldier than a statesman, indifferent in religion and personally adverse to persecution for conscience's sake, his great and almost his only public passion was the humiliation of France through the instrumentality of a European coalition. As an anti-Galican, as the representative of the most illustrious Protestant family in Europe, as allied by blood and marriage to their kings, he was a very fit and proper chief for the English revolutionists, but for the two former of these reasons he was just as naturally anti-pathetic to the Catholic and Celtic majority of the Irish. His designs had been long gradually maturing when James's incredible imprudence hastened his movements. Twenty-four ships of war were assembled at Helvotisluis, seven thousand sailors were put on board, all the veterans of the Netherlands were encamped at Numighen, where six thousand recruits were added to their numbers. On the fifth of November, the anniversary of the gunpowder plot, the Deliverer, as he was fondly called in England, landed at Torbay. On the twenty-fifth of December, James, deserted by his nobles, his army, and even his own unnatural children, arrived a fugitive and a supplient at the court of France. A few Irish incidents of this critical moment deserve mention. The mania against everything Irish took in England forms the most ludicrous and absurd. Wharton's doggerel refrain of Lily Berlero was heard in every circle outside the court. All London, lighted with torches and marshaled under arms, awaited during the memorable Irish night the advent of the terrible and detested regiments brought over by Tyr Connell. Some companies of these troops, quartered in the country, were fallen upon by ten times their numbers and cut to pieces. Others, fighting and inquiring their way, forced a passage to Chester or Bristol and obtained a passage home. They passed at sea, or encountered on the landing-places, multitudes of the Protestant Irish, men, women and children, flying in exactly the opposite direction. Tyr Connell was known to meditate the repeal of the Act of Settlement. The general rumour of a Protestant massacre fixed for the ninth of December originated no one knew how, was spread about no one knew by whom. In vain the Lord Deputy tried to stay the panic, his assurance of protection, and the still better evidence of their own experience, which proved the Irish Catholics incapable of such a project, could not allay their terrors. They rushed into England by every port, and inflamed still more the hostility which already prevailed against King James. In Ulster David Carnes of Nockmanney, the Reverend John Kelsove Ineskellen, a Presbyterian, and Reverend George Walker of Dronegmore, an Anglican minister, were active instruments of the Prince of Orange. On the seventh of December the gates of Derry were shut by the youthhood against the Earl of Antrim and his Highlanders. Ineskellen was seized by a similar impulse of the popular will, and an association was quickly formed throughout Ulster in imitation of the English association which had invited over William under the auspices of Lord Blaney, Sir Arthur Rowden, Sir Clotworthy Skeffington, and others, for the maintenance of the Protestant religion and the dependency of Ireland upon England. By these associates Sligo, Colorene, and the Fort of Cullmore, at the mouth of the foil, were seized for King William, while the town council of Derry, in order to gain time, dispatched one ambassador with one set of instructions to Tyr Connell, and another with a very different set, to the Committee for Irish Affairs, which sat at Whitehall, under the presidency of the Earl of Shrewsbury. CHAPTER V. KING JAMES IN IRELAND, IRISH PARLAMENT OF 1689. A few days after his arrival in France, James dispatched a messenger to Tyr Connell, with instructions expressing great anxiety as to the State of Affairs in Ireland. I am sure, wrote the fugitive monarch, you will hold out to the utmost of your power, and I hope this King will so press the Hollander's that the Prince of Orange will not have men to spare to attack you. All the aid he could obtain from Louis at the moment was seven thousand or eight thousand muskets, which were sent accordingly. Events succeeded each other during the first half of the year 1689 with revolutionary rapidity. The conventions of England and Scotland, though far from being unanimous, declared by immense majorities that James had abdicated and that William and Mary should be offered the crowns of both kingdoms. In February they were proclaimed as King and Queen of England, France, and Ireland, and in May the Scottish commissioners brought them the tender of the crown of Scotland. The double heritage of the Stuart Kings was thus, after nearly a century of possession, transferred by election to a kindred prince, to the exclusion of the direct descendants of the great champion of the right divine, who first united under his scepter the three kingdoms. James, at the court of France, was duly informed of all that passed at London and Edinburgh. He knew that he had powerful partisans in both conventions. The first fever of popular excitement once allayed he marked with exultation the symptoms of reaction. There was much in the circumstances attending to his flight to awaken popular sympathy and to cast a veil over his errors. The pathetic picture drawn of parental suffering by the great dramatist in the character of King Lear seemed to realize to the life in the person of King James. Message followed message from the three kingdoms, urging him to return and place himself at the head of his faithful subjects in a war against the usurper. The French king approved of these recommendations, for in fighting James's battle he was fighting his own, and a squadron was prepared at Brest to carry the fugitive back to his dominions. Accompanied by his natural sons, the Duke of Barrick and the grand prior Fitz James, by Lieutenant Generals de Rosin and de Maumont, Majors General de Poussinion and de Lyrie, or Geraldine, about a hundred officers of all ranks and twelve hundred veterans, James sailed from Brest, with a fleet of thirty-three vessels, and landed at Kinsle on the twelfth day of March, old style. His reception by the southern population was enthusiastic in the extreme. From Kinsle to Cork, from Cork to Dublin, his progress was accompanied by Gaelic songs and dances, by Latin orations, loyal addresses, and all the decorations with which a popular favorite can be welcomed. Nothing was remembered by that easily pacified people but his great misfortunes and his steady fidelity to his and their religion. Fifteen chaplains, nearly all Irish, accompanied him, and added to the delight of the populace, while many a long absent soldier now came back in the following of the King to bless the sight of some aged parent or faithful lover. The royal entry into Dublin was the crowning pageant of this delusive restoration. With the tact and taste for such demonstrations hereditary in the citizens, the trades and art were marshaled before him. Two venerable harpers played on their national instruments near the gate by which he entered, a number of religious in their robes, with a huge cross at their head, chanted as they went. Forty young girls dressed in white danced the ancient rinka, scattering flowers as they danced. The Earl of Tirkanal, lately raised to adductum, the judges, the mayor and corporation, completed the procession, which marched over newly sanded streets, beneath arches of evergreens, and windows hung with tapestry and cloths of eras. Arrived at the castle the sword of state was presented to him by the deputy and the keys of the city by the recorder. At the inner entrance the primate Dr. Dominic Maguire waded in his robes to conduct him to the chapel, lately erected by Tirkanal, where today him was solemnly sung. But of all the incidents of that striking ceremonial, nothing more powerfully impressed the popular imagination than the green flag floating from the main tower of the castle, bearing the significant inscription, now or never, now and forever. A fortnight was devoted by James and Dublin to daily and nightly councils and receptions. The chief advisors who formed his court were the Count d'Avo, Ambassador of France, the Earl of Melfort, Principal Secretary of State, the Duke of Tirkanal, Lieutenant General Lord Mountcashill, Chief Justice Nugent, and the Superior Officers of the Army, French and Irish. One of the first things resolved upon at Dublin was the appointment of the Gallant Viscount Dundee as Lieutenant General in Scotland, and the dispatch to his assistance of an Irish auxiliary force, which served under that renowned chief which as much honour as their predecessors had served under Montrose. Communications were also opened through the Bishop of Chester with the West of England and Jacobites, always numerous in Cheshire, Shropshire, and other counties nearest to Ireland. Certain changes were then made in the Privy Council. Chief Justice Keating's attendance was dispensed with as one opposed to the new policy, but his judicial functions were left untouched. Dr. Cartwright, Bishop of Chester, and the French Ambassador were sworn in, and rits were issued convoking the Irish Parliament for the seventh day of May following. Intermitting for the present the military events which marked the early months of the year, we will follow the acts and deliberations of King James Parliament of 1689. The house is met, according to summons, at the appointed time in the building known as the Inns of Court, within a stone's throw of the castle. There were present two hundred and twenty-eight commoners and forty-six members of the upper house. In the lords several Protestant noblemen and prelates took their seats, and some Catholic peers of ancient date, whose attainers had been reversed, were seen for the first time in that generation in the front rank of their order. In the lower house the university and a few other constituencies were represented by Protestants, but the overwhelming majority were Catholics, either of Norman or Militian origin. The King made a judicious opening speech, declaring his intention to uphold the rights of property and to establish liberty of conscience alike for Protestant and Catholic. He referred to the distressed state of trade and manufactures, and recommended to the attention of the houses those who had been unjustly deprived of their estates under the act of settlement. Three measures passed by this Parliament entitle its members to be enthroned among the chief asserters of civil and religious liberty. One was the act for establishing liberty of conscience, followed by the supplemental act that all persons should pay tithes only to the clergy of their own communion. An act abolishing rits of error and appeal into England, establishing the judicial independence of Ireland, but a still more necessary measure repealing Poynning's law, was defeated through the personal hostility of the King. An act repealing the act of settlement was also passed under protest from the Protestant lords, and received the royal sanction. A bill to establish ends of court for the education of Irish law students was, however, rejected by the King and lost. An act of attainder against persons in arms against the sovereign, whose estates lay in Ireland, was adopted. Whatever may be the bias of historians, it cannot be denied that this Parliament showed a spirit worthy of the representatives of a free people. Though papists, says Mr. Gratton, our highest parliamentary authority, they were not slaves. They wrung a constitution from King James before they accompanied him to the field. The King, unfortunately, had not abandoned the arbitrary principles of his family, even in his worst adversity. His interference with the discussions on Poynning's law, and the ends of court bill, had shocked some of his most devoted adherents. But he proceeded from obstructive to active despotism. He doubled by his mere proclamation the enormous subsidy of twenty thousand pounds monthly voted him by the houses. He established by the same authority a bank, and decreed in his own name a bank restriction act. He debased the coinage and established a fixed scale of prices to be observed by all merchants and traders. In one respect, but in one only, he grossly violated his own professed purpose of establishing liberty of conscience, by endeavouring to force fellows and scholars on the University of Dublin contrary to its statutes. He even went so far as to appoint a provost and a librarian without consent to the Senate. However we may condemn the exclusiveness of the College, this was not the way to correct it. Bigotry, on the one hand, will not justify despotism on the other. More justifiable was the interference of the King for the restoration of rural schools and churches, and the decent maintenance of the clergy and bishops. His appointments to the bench were also, with one or two exceptions, men of the very highest character. The administration of justice during this brief period, says Dr. Cooke Taylor, deserves the highest praise. With the exception of Nugent and Fritten, the Irish judges would have been an honour to any bench. When Tyr Connell met the King at Cork, he gave his majesty a plain account of the posture of military affairs. In Ulster, Lieutenant General Richard Hamilton, at the head of twenty-five hundred regular troops, was holding the rebels in check, from Charlemont to Coloring. In Munster, Lieutenant General Justin McCarthy, Lord Mount Cachell, had taken band and a castle martyr. Throughout the four provinces, the Catholics to the number of fifty regiments, probably thirty thousand men, had volunteered their services. But for all these volunteers, he had only twenty thousand old arms of all kinds, not over one thousand of which were found really valuable. There were, besides these, regiments of horse, Tyr Connell's, Russell's, and Galmonie's, and one of Dragoons, eight small pieces of artillery, but neither stores in the magazines, nor cash in the chest. While at Cork, Tyr Connell, in return for his great exertions, was created a duke, and General-in-Chief, with DeRosina's seconding command. A week before James reached Dublin, Hamilton had beaten the rebels at Dromore, and driven them in on Coloring, from before which he wrote urgently for reinforcements. On receipt of this communication, the Council exhibited, for the first time, those radical differences of opinion, amounting almost to factious opposition which crippled all King James's movements at this period. One party strenuously urged that the King himself should march northward with such troops as could be spared, that his personal appearance before Derry would immediately occasion the surrender of that city, and that he might, in a few weeks, finish in person the campaign of Ulster. Another, at whose head was Tyr Connell, endeavored to dissuade his majesty from this course, but he at length decided in favour of the plan of Melfort and his friends. Accordingly, he marched out of Dublin amid torrents of April rain, on the eighth of that month, intending to form a junction with Hamilton at Straubane, and thence to advance to Derry. The march was a weary one through a country stripped bare of every sign of life, and desolate beyond description. A week was spent between Dublin and O'Mogh, and O'Mogh, news of an English fleet on the foil, caused the King to retrace his steps tasteily to Charlemont. At Charlemont, however, intelligence of fresh successes gained by Hamilton and DeRosin at Claddiford in Straubane came to restore his confidence. He instantly set forward, despite the tempestuous weather, and the almost impassable roads, and on the eighteenth reached the Irish camp at Johnstown, within four or five miles of Derry. It was now four months since the youthhood of Derry had shut the Watergate against Lord Antrim's regiment, and established within their walls a strange sort of government, including eighteen clergymen in the town democracy. The military command remained with Lieutenant Colonel Lundy, of Mount Joyce regiment, but the actual government of the town was vested, first, in Governor Baker, and afterwards in the Reverend George Walker, rector of Donogmore, best known to us as Governor Walker. The town council had dispatched Mr. Carnes, and subsequently Captain Hamilton, founder of the Abercorn Peerage, to England for succor, and had openly proclaimed William and Mary as King and Queen. Defensive works were added where necessary, and on the very day of the affair of Claddiford, four hundred and eighty barrels of gun powder were landed from English ships and conveyed within the walls. As the royalist forces concentrated towards Derry, the chiefs of the Protestant Association fell back before them, each bringing to its garrison the contribution of his own followers. From the Valley of the Ban, over the rugged summits of Carn Togger, from the Glens of Donegal, and the western sea coast round to Mayo, troops of the fugitives hurried to the strong town of the London traitors, as to a city of refuge. Inus Cullen alone, resolute in its insular situation, and encourage akin to that which actuated the defenders of Derry, stood as an outpost of the main object of attack, and delayed the junction of the royalists under Mount Casual with those under Hamilton and DeRosin. Colorene was abandoned. Captain Murray, the commander of Cullmore, forced his way at the head of fifteen hundred men into Derry, contrary to the wishes of the vacillating and suspected Lundy, and from the moment of his arrival infused his own determined spirit into all ranks of the inhabitants. Those who had advised King James to present himself in person before the Protestant stronghold had not acted altogether upon presumption. It is certain that there were Jacobites even in Derry. Lundy, the governor, either despairing of its defence or undecided in his allegiance between James and William, had opened a correspondence with Hamilton and DeRosin. But the true answer of the brave townsmen, when the king advanced to near their walls, was a cannon shot which killed one of his staff, and the cry of no surrender thundered from the walls. James, awakened from his self-complacent dream by this unexpected reception, returned to Dublin to open his Parliament, leaving General Hamilton to continue the siege. Colonel Lundy, distrusted, overruled, and menaced, escaped over the walls by night, disguised as a common labourer, and the party of Murray, Baker, Walker, and Carnes reigned supreme. The story of the siege of Derry, of the heroic constancy of its defenders, of the atrocities of DeRosin and Galmoy, the clemency of Montmont, the forbearance of Hamilton, the struggles for supremacy among its magnets, the turbulence of the townsfolk, the joyful raising of the siege—all these have worthily employed some of the most eloquent pens in our language. The relief came by the breaking of the boom across the harbour's mouth on the last day of July. The bombardment had commenced on the twenty-first of April. The guns had been shut on the seventh of December. The actual siege had lasted above three months, and the blockade about three weeks. The destruction of life on both sides has never been definitely stated. The besieged admit a loss of four thousand men, the besiegers of six thousand. The want of siege guns in the Jacobite camp is admitted by both parties, but nevertheless the defence of the place well deserves to be celebrated, as it has been by an imperial historian, as the most memorable in British annals. Scarcely inferior in interest in importance to the siege of Derry was the spirited defence of Ennis Kellyn. That fine old town, once the seat of the noble family of Maguire, is naturally dyked and moded round about by the waters of Laquern. In December eighty-eight it had closed its gates and barricaded its causeways to keep out a Jacobite garrison. In March, on Lord Galmoy's approach, all the outlying garrisons in Fermanog and Kevan had destroyed their posts and gathered into Ennis Kellyn. The cruel and faithless Galmoy, instead of inspiring terror into the united garrison, only increased their determination to die in the breach. So strong in position and numbers did they find themselves with the absolute command of the lower Laquern to bring in their supplies that in April they sent off a detachment to the relief of Derry, and in the months of May and June made several successful forays into Balancarig, Omog, and Belturbit. In July, provided with a fresh supply of ammunition from the fleet intended for the relief of Derry, they beat up the Duke of Barracks' quarters at Trelik, but were repulsed with some loss. The Duke being soon after recalled to join de Rosen, the siege of Ennis Kellyn was committed to Lord Mount Cashel, under whom, as commander of the cavalry, served Count Anthony Hamilton, author of the witty but licentious Memoirs of Grimond and other distinguished officers. Mount Cashel's whole force consisted of three regiments of foot, two of dragoons, and some horse, but he expected to be joined by Colonel Sarsfield from Sligo and Barrick from Derry. The besieged had drawn four regiments of foot from Kevan alone, and were probably twice that number in all, and they had, in Colonel's Woolsey and Barrick, able and energetic officers. The Ennis Kellyners did not await the attack from within their fortress. At Linniskaya, under Barrick, they repulsed the advanced guard of the Jacobites under Anthony Hamilton, and the same day, the day of the relief of Derry, their whole force were brought into action with Mount Cashel's at Newtown Butler. To the cry of no popery Woolsey led them into action, the most considerable yet fall. The raw southern levees on the royalist side were routed by the hardy Ennis Kellyners, long familiar with the use of arms, and well acquainted with every inch of the ground. Two thousand of them were left on the field, four hundred prisoners were taken, among them dangerously, but not mortally wounded, was the Lieutenant General himself. The month of August was a month of general rejoicing for the Williamites of Ulster. Derosin and Barrick had retreated from Denny. Sarsfield, on his way to join Mount Cashel, fell back to Sligo on hearing of his defeat at Newtown Butler. Cullmore, Coleraine, and Bally Shannon were retaken and well supplied. Fugitives returned triumphantly to their homes, in Kavan, Fermanog, Tyrone, and Armog. A panic created by false reports spread among his troops at Sligo compelled Sarsfield to fall still further back to Athelon. Six months after his arrival, with the exception of the forts of Charlemont and Carrick-Fergus, King James no longer possessed a garrison in that province, which had been bestowed by his grandfather upon the ancestors of those who now unanimously rejected and resisted him. The fall of the Galant Dundee in the battle of Kiliccrunky, five days before the relief of Derry, freed King William from immediate anxiety on the side of Scotland, and enabled him to concentrate his whole disposable force on Ireland. On the thirteenth of August, an army of eighteen regiments of foot and four or five of horse, under the marshall duped to Schomburg, with Count Somes as second in command, sailed into Belfast Locke, and took possession of the town. On the twentieth, the marshall opened a fierce cannonade on Carrick-Fergus, defended by colonels McCarthy Moore and Cormac O'Neill, while the fleet bombarded it from the sea. After eight days incessant cannonade, the garrison surrendered on honorable terms, and Schomburg faced southwards towards Dublin. Brave and long experienced, the aged duke moved according to the cautious maxims of the military school in which he had been educated. He advanced rapidly on the capital. James must have fallen back, as DeRosin advised, on the line of the Shannon. But O'Regan, at Charlemont and Barricot Neury, seemed to him obstacles so serious that nearly a month was wasted in advancing from Belfast to Dundalk, where he entrenched himself in September and went into winter quarters. Here a terrible dysentery broke out among his troops, said to have been introduced by some soldiers from Derry, and so destructive were its ravages that they were hardly left healthy men enough to bury the dead. Several of the French Catholics under his command also deserted to James, who, from his headquarters at Dragheta, offered every inducement to the deserters. Others discovered in the attempt were tried and hanged, and others still suspected of similar designs were marched down to Carlingford and shipped for England. In November James returned from Dragheta to Dublin, much elated that Duke Schomburg, whose fatal camp at Dundalk he had in vain attempted to raise, had shrunk from meeting him in the field. The Army's now destined to combat for two kings on Irish soil were strongly marked by those distinctions of race and religion which add bitterness to struggles for power, while they present striking contrast to the eye of the painter of military life and manners. King James's troops were, in fact, in the midst of the war, while they present striking contrast to the eye of the painter of military life and manners. King James's troops were chiefly Celtic and Catholic. There were four regiments commanded by O'Neill's, two by O'Brien's, two by O'Kelly's, one each by McCarthy-Morm, McGuire, O'Mour, O'Donnell, McMahon, and McGinnis, principally recruited among their own clansmen. There were also the regiments of Sarsfield, Nugent, Decorsi, Fitzgerald, Grace, and Burke, chiefly Celts, in the rank and file. On the other hand, Schomburg led into the field the famous Blue Dutch and White Dutch regiments, the Huguenot regiments of Schomburg, La Milenier, du Cambon, and La Caillement, the English regiments of lords Devonshire, Delamere, Lovelace, Sir John Lanier, colonels Langston, Villiers, and others, the Anglo-Irish regiments of lords Mieth, Roscommon, Kingston, and Drugheada, with the Ulstermen, under Brigadier Wolseley, colonels Gustavus Hamilton, Mitchell Byrne, Lloyd, White, St. John, and Tiffany. Some important changes had taken place on both sides during the winter months. Davos and de Rosen had been recalled at James' request. Mount Cachele, at the head of the first Franco-Irish brigade, had been exchanged for six thousand French, under de Lausanne, who arrived the following March in the double character of General and Ambassador. The report that William was to command in person in the next campaign was of itself an indication pregnant with other changes to the minds of his adherents. Their abundant supplies of military stores from England wafted from every port upon the Channel, where James had not a keel of float, enabled the Williamite army to take the initiative in the campaign of sixteen ninety. At Coven, Brigadier Wolseley repulsed the Duke of Barrick, with a loss of two hundred men and some valuable officers. But the chief incident preceding William's arrival was the siege of Charlemagne. This siege, which commenced apparently in the previous autumn, had continued during several months, till the garrison were literally starved out in May. The famished survivors were kindly treated by order of Schomburg, and their gallant and eccentric chief, O'Regan, was knighted by the king for his persistent resistance. A month from the day on which Charlemagne fell, June 14th, William landed at Carrot-Fergus, accompanied by Prince George of Denmark, the Duke of Wurttemberg, the Prince of Hesse-Darmont, the Second and Last Duke of Armand, Major General McKay, the Earls of Oxford, Portland, Scarborough, and Manchester, General Douglas, and other distinguished British and foreign officers. At Belfast, his first headquarters, he ascertained the forces at his disposal to be upwards of forty thousand men, composed of a strange medley of all nations, Scandinavians, Swiss, Dutch, Prussians, Huguenot French, English, Scotch, Scotch Irish, and Anglo-Irish. Perhaps the most extraordinary element in that strange medley was the Danish contingent of horse and foot. Irish tradition and Irish prophecy still teemed with tales of horror and predictions of evil at the hands of the Danes, while these hearty mercenaries observed, with grim satisfaction, that the memory of their fierce ancestors had not become extinct after the lapse of twenty generations. At the Boine, and at Limerick, they could not conceal their exultation as they encamped on some of the very earthworks raised by men of their race seven centuries before, and it must be admitted that they vindicated their descent, both by their courage and their cruelty. On the sixteenth of June, James, informed of William's arrival, marched northward at the head of twenty thousand men, French and Irish, to meet him. On the twenty second, James was at Dundalk and William at Neury, as the latter advanced, the Jacobites retired, and finally chose their ground at the Boine, resolved to hazard a battle for the preservation of Dublin and the safety of the province of Lester. On the last day of June, the hostile forces confronted each other at the Boine. The gentle, legendary river, wreathed in all the glory of its abundant foliage, was startled with the cannonade from the Northern Bank, which continued through the long summer's evening and woke the early echoes of the morrow. William, strong in his veteran ranks, welcomed the battle. James, strong in his defensive position and the goodness of his cause, awaited it with confidence. On the Northern Bank, near the ford of Old Bridge, William, with his chief officers, breakfasting on the turf, nearly lost his life from a sudden discharge of cannon, but he was quickly in the saddle, at all points reviewing his army. James, on the heel of Dunnore, looked down on his devoted followers, through whose ranks rode Tyr Connell, Lame and Ill, the youthful Barrick, the adventurous Lausanne, and the beloved Sarsfield, everywhere received with cordial acclamations. The battle commenced at the ford of Old Bridge, between Sir Neil O'Neill and the younger Schaumburg. O'Neill fell mortally wounded and the ford was forced. By this ford, William ordered his centre to advance under the older Schaumburg, as the hour of noon approached, while he himself moved with the left across the river, nearer to Drugheada. Lausanne, with Sarsfield's horse, dreading to be outflanked, had galloped to guard the bridge of Slane, five miles higher up the stream, where alone a flank movement was possible. The battle was now transferred from the gunners to the swordsmen and pikemen, from the banks to the fords and the borders of the river. William, on the extreme left, swam his horse across in imminent danger. Schaumburg and Calimat fell in the centre, mortally wounded. News was brought to William that Dr. Walker, recently appointed to the Sea of Dairy, had also fallen. What brought him there was the natural comment of the soldier-prince. After seven hours fighting, the Irish fell back on Dalík, in good order. The assailants admitted five hundred killed, and as many wounded, the defenders were said to have lost from one thousand fifteen hundred men, less than at Newtown Butler. The carnage, compared with some great battles of that age, was inconsiderable, but the political consequences were momentous. The next day, the garrison of Jugheta, one thousand three hundred strong, surrendered. In another week, William was in Dublin, and James, terrified by the reports which had reached him, was en route for France. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the fate of Europe was decided by the result of the Battle of the Boing. At Paris, at the Hague, at Vienna, at Rome, at Madrid, nothing was talked of but the great victory of the Prince of Orange over Louis and James. It is one of the strangest complications of history that the vanquished Irish Catholics seem to have never been once thought of by Spain, Austria, or the Pope. In the greater issues of the European Coalition against France, their interests and their very existence were, for the moment, forgotten. The defeat at the Boing, and the surrender of Dublin, uncovered the entire province of Lenster, Kilkenny, Wexford, Waterford, Duncanon, Clonmel, and other places of less importance surrendered within six weeks. The line of the Shannon was fallen back upon by the Irish, and the points of attack and defense were now shifted to Athelon and Limerick. What Ineskellen and Derry had been, in the previous year, to the Williamite Party in the North, cities of refuge, and strong holds of hope, these two towns upon the Shannon had now become by the fortune of war to King James's adherents. On the 17th of July, General Douglas appeared before Athelon and summoned it to surrender. The veteran commandant, Colonel Richard Grace, a Confederate of 1641, having destroyed the bridge and the suburbs on the Lenster side of the Shannon, replied by discharging his pistol over the head of the drummer who delivered the message. Douglas attempted to cross the river at Lanesborough, but found the Ford strongly guarded by one of Grace's outposts. After a week's ineffectual bombardment, he withdrew from Athelon and proceeded to Limerick, ravaging and slaying as he went. Limerick had at first been abandoned by the French under Lausanne as utterly indefensible. That gay intriguer desired nothing so much as to follow the King to France, while Tyr Connell, broken down with physical suffering and mental anxiety, feebly concurred in his opinion. They accordingly departed for Galway, leaving the city to its fate, and happily for the national reputation to boulder councils than their own. De Boiselo did not underrate the character of the Irish levies, who had retreated before twice their numbers at the Boine. He declared himself willing to remain, and sustained by Sarsfield he was chosen as commandant. More than ten thousand foot had gathered as if by instinct that city, and on the clereside Sarsfield still kept together his cavalry, at whose head he rode to Galway, and brought back to your Connell. On the ninth of August William, confident of an easy victory, appeared before the town, but more than twelve months were to elapse before all his power could reduce those mouldering walls, which the fugitive French ambassador had declared might be taken with roasted apples. An exploit, planned and executed by Sarsfield the day succeeding William's arrival, saved the city for another year, and raised that officer to the highest pitch of popularity. Along the clereside of the Shannon, under cover of the night, he galloped as fast as horse could carry him, at the head of his dragoons, and crossed the river at Killaloe. One man as O'Brien, a Protestant of Clare, who had encountered the flying horsemen, and learned enough to suspect their design, hastened to William's camp with the news, but he was at first laughed at for his pains. William, however, never despising any precaution in war, dispatched to John Lanier with five hundred horse to protect his siege train, then seven miles in the rear, on the road between Limerick and Casual. Sarsfield, however, was too quick for Sir John. The day after he had crossed at Killaloe he kept his men pure due in the hilly country, and the next night swooped down upon the convoy in charge of the siege train, who were quietly sleeping round the ruined church of Ballinetti. The sentinels were sabred at their posts, the guards, half dressed, fled in terror or were speedily killed. The gun carriages were quickly yoked and drawn together to a convenient place, where planted in pits with ammunition they were, with two exceptions, successfully blown to atoms. Lanier arrived within view of the terrific scene in time to feel its stunning effects. The ground for miles around shook as if from an earthquake. The glare and roar of the explosion were felt in William's camp and through the beleaguered city. On the morrow, all was known. Sarsfield was safely back in his old encampment, without the loss of a single man. Limerick was in an uproar of delight, while William's army, to the lowest rank, felt the depression of so unexpected a blow. A week later, however, the Providence Prince had a new siege train of thirty-six guns and four mortars brought up from Waterford, pouring red hot shot on the devoted city. Another week, on the twenty-seventh of August, a gap having been made in the walls near St. John's Gate, a storming party of the English Guards, the Anglo-Irish, Prussians and Danes, was launched into the breach. After an action of uncommon fierceness and determination on both sides, the besiegers retired with the loss of thirty officers and eight hundred men killed and twelve hundred wounded. The besieged admitted four hundred killed, their wounded were not counted. Four days later William abandoned the siege, retreated to Waterford and embarked for England, with Prince George of Denmark, the Dukes of Wurtenberg and Ormond, and others of his principal adherents. Tyr Connell, laboring with the illness of which he soon after died, took advantage of the honourable pause thus obtained to proceed on his interrupted voyage to France, accompanied by the ambassador. Before leaving, however, the young Duke of Barrick was named in his stead as Commander-in-Chief, Fitten, Nagel and Plowden, as Lord's Justices. Sixteen senators were to form a sort of cabinet, and Sarsfield to be second in military command. His enemies declared that Tyr Connell retired from the contest because his early spirit and courage had failed him. He himself asserted that his object was to procure sufficient suckers from King Louis to give a decisive issue to the war. His subsequent negotiations at Paris proved that, though his bodily health might be wretched, his ingenuity and readiness of resource had not deserted him. He justified himself, both with James and Louis, outwitted Lausanne, propitiated Lavoy, disarmed the prejudices of the English Jacobites, and, in short, placed the military relations of France and Ireland on a footing they had never hitherto sustained. The expedition of the following spring, under command of Marshal St. Ruth, was mainly procured by his able diplomacy, and though he returned to Ireland to survive but a few weeks, the disastrous day of Ogrim, it is possible, from the Irish point of view, not to recall with admiration, mixed indeed with Alloy, but still with largely prevailing admiration, the extraordinary energy, buoyancy, and talents of Richard, Duke of Tyr Connell. CHAPTER VIII. THE WINTER OF 1690-91. The Jacobite Party in England were not slow to exaggerate the extent of William's losses before Athelone and Limerick. The national susceptibility was consoled by the ready reflection that if the beaten troops were partly English, the commanders were mainly foreigners. A native hero was needed, and was found in the person of Marlborough, a captain whose name was destined to eclipse every other English reputation of that age. At his suggestion an expedition was fitted out against Cork, Kinsle, and other parts of the south of Ireland, and the command, though not without some secret unwillingness on William's part, committed to him. On the twenty-third of September, at the head of eight thousand fresh troops, amply supplied with all necessary munitions, Marlborough assaulted Cork. After five days bombardment in which the Duke of Grafton and other officers and men were slain, the Governor, MacElegate, capitulated on conditions which in spite of all Marlborough's exertions were flagrantly violated. The old town of Kinsle was at once abandoned as untenable on the same day, and the new fort at the entrance to the harbour was surrendered after a fortnight's cannonate. Covered with glory from a five weeks' campaign, Marlborough returned to England to receive the acclamations of the people and the most gracious compliments of the Prince. Barak and Sarsfield on the one side and Ginkle and Launier on the other kept up the winter campaign till an advanced period on both banks of the Shannon. About the middle of September the former made a dash over the bridge of Banniger, against Beer, or Parsons Town, the family borough of the famous undertaker. The English in great force, under Launier, Kirk and Douglas, hastened to its relief, and the Irish fell back to Banniger. To destroy that convenient pass became now the object of one party, to protect it of the other. After some skirmishing and maneuvering on both sides, the disputed bridge was left in Irish possession, and the English fell back to the borough and castle of Sir Lawrence Parsons. During the siege of the new fort at Kinsle, Barak and Sarsfield advanced as far as Kilmelock to its relief. But finding themselves so inferior in numbers to Marlborough, they were unwillingly compelled to leave its brave defenders to their fate. Although the Duke of Barak was the nominal commander-in-chief, his youth, and the distraction's incident to youth, left the more mature and popular Sarsfield the possession of real power, both civil and military. Every fortunate accident had combined to elevate that gallant cavalry officer into the position of national leadership. He was the son of a member of the Irish commons, prescribed for his patriotism and religion in 1641 by Anna O'Mour, daughter of the organiser of the Catholic Confederation. He was a Catholic in religion, spoke Gaelic as easily as English, was brave, impulsive, handsome, and generous to a fault, like the men he led. In TierConnell's absence every sincere lover of the country came to him with intelligence and looked to him for direction. Early in November he learned, through his patriotic spies, the intention of the Williamites to force the passage of the Shannon in the depth of winter. On the last day of December, accordingly, they marched in great force under Kirk and Lanier to Jonesboro and under Douglas to Jamestown. At both points they found the indefatagable Sarsfield fully prepared for them, and after a fortnight's intense suffering from exposure to the weather, were glad to get back again to their snug quarters at Parsons Town. Early in February TierConnell landed at Limerick with a French fleet escorted by three vessels of war and laden with provisions, but bringing few arms and no reinforcements. He had brought over, however, fourteen thousand golden louis, which were found of the utmost service in reclothing the army, besides ten thousand more which he had deposited at Brest, to purchase oatmeal for subsequent shipment. He also brought promises of military assistance on a scale far beyond anything France had yet afforded. It is almost needless to say that he was received at Galway and Limerick with an enthusiasm which silenced, if it did not confute, his political enemies, both in Ireland and France. During his absence intrigues and factions had been rifer than ever in the Jacobite ranks. Sarsfield had discovered that the English movement on the Shannon in December was partly hastened by foolish or treacherous correspondence among his own associates. Lord Riverston and his brother were removed from the Senate, or Council of 16, four from each province, and Judge Daly, ancestor of the Dunsandal family, was placed under arrest at Galway. The youthful barracks sometimes complained that he was tutored and overruled by Sarsfield. But though the impetuous soldier may occasionally have forgotten the lessons learned in courts, his activity seems to have been the greatest, his information the best, his advice the most disinterested, and his fortitude the highest of any member of the Council. By the time of Tyr Connell's return he had grown to a height of popularity and power which could not well break a superior either in the cabinet or the camp. On the arrival of the Lord Lieutenant, who was also Commander-in-Chief, the ambition of Sarsfield was gratified by the rank of Earl of Lucan, a title drawn from that pleasant hamlet in the valley of the Liffey where he had learned to lisp the catechism of a patriot at the knee of Anna O'More. But his real power was much diminished. Tyr Connell, Barrick, Sir Richard Nagel, who had succeeded the Earl of Melfort as Chief Secretary for King James, all ranked before him at the board, and when St. Ruth arrived to take command in Chief, he might fairly have complained that he was deprived of the Chief reward to which he had looked forward. The weary winter and the drenching spring rains wore away, and the Williamite troops, sorely afflicted by disease, hugged their tents and hunts. Summer leaf was sent by sea to the Jacobite garrison of Sligo, commanded by the stout old Sartigo Reagan, the former defender of Charlemont. Athelon, too, received some suckers, and the line of the Shannon was still unbroken, from sleeve and iron to the sea. But still the promised French assistance was delayed. Men were beginning to doubt both King Louis and King James, when at length, at the beginning of May, the French ships were signalled from the cliffs of Cary. On the 8th, the Sir to St. Ruth, with Generals Dusan and Dittess, landed at Limerick, and assisted at a solemn to-dayum in St. Mary's Cathedral. They brought considerable supplies of clothes, provisions, and ammunition, but neither veterans to swell the ranks, nor money to replenish the chest. St. Ruth entered eagerly upon the discharge of his duties as General Isimo, while Sarsfield continued the nominal second in command. CHAPTER IX. THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR. Campaign of 1691. BATTLE OF AUGREM. CAPITULATION OF LIMERICK. St. Ruth, with absolute powers, found himself placed at the head of from twenty thousand to twenty five thousand men, in the field or in garrison, regular or irregular, but all with hardly an exception, Irish. His and Tyr Connell's recent supplies had suffice to renew the clothing and equipment of the greater part of the number, but the whole contents of the army chest, the golden hinge on which war moves, was estimated in the beginning of May to afford each soldier only a penny a day for three weeks. He had under him some of the best officers that France could spare or Ireland produce, and he had with him the hearts of nine-tenths of the natives of the country. A singular illustration of the popular feeling occurred the previous August. The Malaysian Irish had cherished the belief, ever since the disastrous day of Kinsale, that an O'Donnell from Spain, having on his shoulder a red mark, Balderg, would return to free them from the English yoke in a great battle near Limerick. Interestingly, when a representative of the Spanish O'Donnells actually appeared at Limerick, bearing as we know many of his family have done, even to our day, the unmistakable red mark of the ancient Tyr Connell line, immense numbers of the country people who had held aloof from the Jacobite cause, obeyed the voice of prophecy, and flocked round the Celtic Deliverer. From seven thousand to eight thousand recruits were soon at his disposal, and it was not without bitter indignation that the chief, so enthusiastically received, saw regiment after regiment drafted from among his followers, and transferred to other commanders. Bread up a Spanish subject, the third in descent from an Irish prince. It is not to be wondered at that he regarded the Irish cause as O'Donnell and the interests of King James as entirely secondary. He could hardly consider himself as bound in allegiance to that king. He was in no way indebted to him or his family, and if we learned that, when the war grew desperate, but before it was ended, he had entered into a separate treaty for himself and his adherents, with Williams Generals. We must remember, before we condemn him, that we are speaking of an hibernose faniord, to whom the House of Steward was no more sacred than the House of Orange. The Williamite army rendezvoused at Mullingar towards the end of May, under Generals DeGinkel, Talmish, and McKay. On the seventh of June, they moved in the direction of Athelone, eighteen thousand strong. The ranks won blaze of scarlet, and the artillery such as had never before been seen in Ireland. The capture of Balomor Castle in West Meath detained them ten days. On the nineteenth, joined by the Duke of Wurttemberg, the Prince of Hessa and the Count of Nassau, with seven thousand foreign mercenaries, the whole sat down before the English town of Athelone, which St. Ruth, contrary to his Irish advisors, resolved to defend. In twenty-four hours those exposed outwards abandoned by the veteran Grace the previous year fell, and the bombardment of the Irish town on the opposite, or Canot Bank, commenced. For ten days, from the twentieth through the thirtieth of June, that fearful cannonade continued. Story, the Williamite chaplain, to whom we are indebted for many valuable particulars of this war, states of the besiegers fired above twelve thousand cannon-shot, six hundred shells, and many tons of stone into the place. Fifty tons of powder were burned in the bombardment. The castle, and imposing but lofty and antique structure, windowed as much for a residence as a fortress, tumbled into ruins. The bridge was broken down and impassable, the town a heap of rubbish, where two men could no longer walk abreast. But the Shannon had diminished in volume as the summer advanced, and three Danes employed for that purpose found a fort above the bridge, and at six o'clock, on the evening of the last day of June, two thousand picked men, headed by Gustavus Hamilton's grenadiers, dashed into the fort at the stroke of a bell. At the same instant all the English batteries on the Lenster side opened on the Irish town, wrapping the river in smoke, and distracting the attention of the besiegers. St. Ruth was at this critical moment at his camp two miles off, and Dussan, the commandant, was also absent from his post. In half an hour the Williamites were masters of the heap of rubbish which had once been Athelone, with a loss of less than fifty men killed and wounded. For this bold and successful movement de Ginkle was created earl of Athelone, and his chief officers were justly ennobled. St. Ruth, overconfident, in a strange country, withdrew to Balanaslow, behind the river Suck, and prepared to risk everything on the hazard of a pitched battle. De Ginkle moved slowly from Athelone in pursuit of his enemy. On the morning of the eleventh of July, as the early haze lifted itself in reeds from the landscape, he found himself within range of the Irish, drawn up north and south on the upland of Kilkomodon Hill, with a morass on either flank, through which ran two narrow causeways. On the right, the pass of Uratri, on the left, the causeway leading to the little village of Agrim. St. Ruth's forces must have numbered from fifteen thousand to twenty thousand men, with nine field pieces. De Ginkle commanded from twenty five thousand to thirty thousand, with four batteries, two of which mounted six guns each. During the entire day, attack after attack, in the direction of Uratri or of Agrim, was repulsed, and the assailants were about to retire in despair. As the sun sank, a last desperate attempt was made with equal ill success. Now, my children, cried the elated St. Ruth, the day is ours. Now I shall drive them back to the walls of Dublin. At that moment he fell by a cannon shot to the earth, and stayed the advancing tide of victory. The enemy marked the check, halted, rallied and returned. Sarsfield, who had not been entrusted with his leader's plan of action, was unable to remedy the mischief which ensued. Victory arrested was converted into defeat. The sun went down on Agrim, and the last great Irish battle between the Reformed and the Roman religions. Four thousand of the Catholics were killed and wounded, and three thousand of the Protestants littered the field. Above five hundred prisoners, with thirty two pairs of colors, eleven standards, and a large quantity of small arms, fell into the hands of the victors. One portion of the fugitive survivors fled to Galway, the larger part including all the cavalry to Limerick. This double blow at Athelon and Agrim shook to pieces the remaining Catholic power in Canot. Galway surrendered ten days after the battle. Balderg O'Donnell, after a vain attempt to throw himself into it in time, made terms with Deginkel, and carried his two regiments into Flanders to fight on the side Spain and Rome had chosen to take in the European coalition. Sligo, the last Western garrison, succumbed, and the brave Sartigo Reagan marched to six hundred men, survivors, southward to Limerick. Thus once more, all eyes and all hearts in the British islands were turned towards the well-known city of the Lower Shannon. There, on the fourteenth of August, Tyr Connell expired, stricken down by Apoplexy. On the twenty-fifth, Deginkel reinforced by all the troops he could gather in with safety had invested the place on three sides. Sixty guns, none of less than twelve pounds caliber, opened their deadly fire against it. An English fleet ascended the river hurling its missiles right and left. On the ninth of September the garrison made an unsuccessful sally with heavy loss. On the tenth a breach, forty yards wide, was made in the wall overhanging the river. On the night of the fifteenth, through the treachery or negligence of Brigadier Clifford, on guard at the clear side of the river, a pontoon bridge was laid, and a strong English division crossed over in utter silence. The Irish horse, which had hitherto kept open communications with the country on that side, fell back to six-mile bridge. On the twenty-fourth, a truce of three days was agreed upon, and on the third of October the memorable Treaty of Limerick was signed by the Williamite and Jacobite commissioners. The civil articles of Limerick will be mentioned farther on. The military articles, twenty-nine in number, provided that all persons willing to expatriate themselves, as well as officers and soldiers, as rapparies and volunteers, should have free liberty to do so, to any place beyond seas, except England and Scotland, that they might depart in whole bodies, companies or parties, that if plundered by the way, William's government should make good their loss, that fifty ships of two hundred tons each should be provided for their transportation, besides two men of war for the principal officers. That the garrison of Limerick might march out with all their arms, guns and baggage, colors flying, drum-speeding, and matches lighting. It was also agreed that those who so wished might enter into the service of William, retaining their rank and pay, but though DeGinkel was most eager to secure for his master some of these stalwart battalions, only one thousand out of the thirteen thousand that marched out of Limerick filed to the left at King's Island. Two thousand others accepted passes and protections. Forty-five hundred sailed with Sarsfield from Cork. Forty-seven hundred, with Dusson and de Tess, embarked in the Shannon on board a French fleet which arrived a week too late to prevent the capitulation. In English ships, three thousand embarked with General Watchup. All which, added to Mount Casual's brigade, over five thousand strong, gave an Irish army of from twenty thousand to twenty five thousand men to the service of King Louis. As the ships from Ireland reached Brest and the ports of Brittany, James himself came down from St. German to receive them. They were at once granted the rights of French citizenship without undergoing the forms of naturalization. Many of them rose to eminent positions in war and diplomacy, became founders of distinguished families, or dying childless, left their hard one gold to endow free verses at Douay and Louvain for poor Irish scholars destined for the service of the church, for which they had fought the good fight, in another sense, on the Shannon and the Boyne. The migration of ecclesiastics was almost as extensive as that of the military. They were shipped by dozens and by scores from Dublin, Cork, and Galway. In seven years from the treaty there remained but four hundred secular and eight hundred regular clergy in the country. Nearly double that number, deported by threats or violence, were scattered over Europe, pensioners on the princes and bishops of their faith, or the institutions of their order. In Rome seventy two thousand francs annually were allotted for the maintenance of the fugitive Irish clergy, and during the first three months of sixteen ninety nine, three remittances from the Holy Father, amounting to ninety thousand leavers, were placed in the hands of the Nuncio at Paris, for the temporary relief of the fugitives in France and Flanders. It may also be added here that till the end of the eighteenth century an annual charge of one thousand Roman crowns was born by the papal treasury for the encouragement of Catholic poor schools in Ireland. The Revolutionary War, thus closed, had cost King William, or rather the people of England, at least ten million of pounds sterling, and with the other wars of that reign laid the foundation of the English national debt. As to the loss of life, the Williamite chaplain, story, places it at one hundred thousand, young and old, besides treble the number that are ruined and undone. The chief consolation of the vanquished in that struggle was that they had rung even from their adversaries the reputation of being one of the most warlike of nations, that they buried the synagogue with honor.