excite serious apprehensions as to the king's ulterior designs; but it was magnified tenfold by the public apprehensions. It may well be supposed that the rude kerne of Connaught, placed, with arms in his hands, among a foreign people whom he hated, and by whom he was hated in turn, was guilty of some excesses. These excesses were exaggerated by report; and, in addition to the outrages which the stranger had really committed, all the offenses of his English comrades were set down to his account. From every corner of the kingdom a cry arose against the foreign barbarians who forced themselves into private houses, seized horses and wagons, extorted money, and insulted women. These men, it was said, were the sons of those who, forty-seven years before, had massacred Protestants by tens of thousands. The history of the rebellion of 1641, a history which, even when soberly related, might well move pity and horror, and which had been frightfully distorted by national and religious antipathies, was now the favorite topic of conversation. Hideous stories of houses burned with all the inmates, of women and young children butchered, of near relations compelled by torture to be the murderers of each other, of corpses outraged and mutilated, were told and heard with full belief and intense interest. Then it was added that the dastardly savages who had by surprise committed all these cruelties on an unsuspecting and defenseless colony had, as soon as Oliver came among them on his great mission of vengeance, flung down their arms in panic terror, and had sunk, without trying the chances of a single pitched field, into that slavery which was their fit portion. Many signs indicated that another great spoliation and slaughter of the Saxon settlers was meditated by the lord lieutenant. Already thousands of Protestant colonists, flying from the injustice and insolence of Tyrconnel, had raised the indignation of the mother country by describing all that they had suffered, and all that they had, with too much reason, feared. How much the public mind had been excited by the complaints of these fugitives had recently been shown

in a manner not to be mistaken. Tyrconnel had transnitted for the royal approbation the heads of a bill repealing the law by which half the soil of Ireland was held, and he had sent to Westminster, as his agents, two of his Roman Catholic countrymen who had lately been raised to high judicial office: Nugent, chief justice of the Irish Court of King's Bench, a personification of all the vices and weaknesses which the English then imagined to be characteristic of the Popish Celt; and Rice, a baron of the Irish Exchequer, who, in abilities and attainments, was perhaps the foremost man of his race and religion. The object of the mission was well known; and the two judges could not venture to show themselves in the streets. If ever they were recognized, the rabble shouted, "Room for the Irish embassadors ;" and their coach was escorted with mock solemnity by a train of ushers and harbingers bearing sticks with potatoes stuck on the points.*

So strong and general, indeed, was at that time the aversion of the English to the Irish, that the most distinguished Roman Catholics partook of it. Powis and Bellasyse expressed, in coarse and acrimonious language, even at the council board, their antipathy to the aliens.† Among English Protestants that antipathy was still stronger; and perhaps it was strongest in the army. Neither officers nor soldiers were disposed to bear patiently the preference shown by their master to a foreign and a subject race. The Duke of Berwick, who was colonel of the Eighth Regiment of the Line, then quartered at Portsmouth, gave orders that thirty men, just arrived from Ireland, should be enlisted. The English soldiers declared that they would not serve with these intruders. John Beaumont, the lieutenant colonel, in his own name and in the name of five of the captains, protested to the duke's face against this insult to the English army and nation. "We raised the regiment," he said, " at our own charges,

* King's State of the Protestants of Ireland; Secret Consults of the Romish Party in Ireland.

+ Secret Consults of the Romish Party in Ireland.

had tra

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fice d

of all

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of popery and of the Milesian race. The Protestant heir will be excluded. The Protestant officers will be broken. The Great Charter and the praters who appeal to it will be hanged in one rope. The good Talbot will shower commissions on his countrymen, and will cut the throats of the English. These verses, which were in no respect above the ordinary standard of street poetry, had for burden some gibberish which was said to have been used as a watchword by the insurgents of Ulster in 1641. verses and the tune caught the fancy of the nation. From one end of England to the other all classes were constantly singing this idle rhyme. It was especially the delight of the English army. More than seventy years after the Revolution, a great writer delineated, with exquisite skill, a veteran who had fought at the Boyne and at Namur. One of the characteristics of the good old soldier is his trick of whistling Lillibullero.*

The

Wharton afterward boasted that he had sung a king out of three kingdoms. But, in truth, the success of Lillibullero was the effect, and not the cause, of that excited state of public feeling which produced the Revo

lution.

While James was thus raising against himself all those national feelings which, but for his own folly, might have saved his throne, Louis was in another way exerting himself no less effectually to facilitate the enterprise which William meditated.

The party in Holland which was favorable to France was a minority, but a minority strong enough, according to the constitution of the Batavian federation, to prevent the stadtholder from striking any great blow. To keep | that minority steady was an object to which, if the court of Versailles had been wise, every other object would at that conjuncture have been postponed. Louis, however,

* The song of Lillibullero is among the State Poems. In Percy's Relics the first part will be found, but not the second part, which was added after William's landing. In the Examiner and in several pamphlets of 1712 Wharton is mentioned as the author.

had, during some time, labored, as if of set purpose, to estrange his Dutch friends; and he at length, though not without difficulty, succeeded in forcing them to become his enemies at the precise moment at which their help would have been invaluable to him.

There were two subjects on which the people of the United Provinces were peculiarly sensitive, religion and trade; and both their religion and their trade the French king had assailed. The persecution of the Huguenots, and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, had every where moved the grief and indignation of Protestants. But in Holland these feelings were stronger than in any other country; for many persons of Dutch birth, confiding in the repeated and solemn declarations of Louis that the toleration granted by his grandfather should be maintained, had, for commercial purposes, settled in France, and a large proportion of the settlers had been naturalized there. Every post now brought to Holland the tidings that these persons were treated with extreme rigor on account of their religion. Dragoons, it was reported, were quartered on one. Another had been held naked before a fire till he was half roasted. All were forbidden, under the severest penalties, to celebrate the rites of their religion, or to quit the country into which they had, under false pretenses, been decoyed. The partisans of the house of Orange exclaimed against the cruelty and perfidy of the tyrant. The Opposition was abashed and dispirited. Even the town council of Amsterdam, though strongly attached to the French interest and to the Arminian theology, and though little inclined to find fault with Louis or to sympathize with the Calvinists whom he perşecuted, could not venture to oppose itself to the general sentiment, for in that great city there was scarcely one wealthy merchant who had not some kinsman or friend among the sufferers. Petitions numerously and respectably signed were presented to the burgomasters, imploring them to make strong representations to Avaux. There were even suppliants who made their way into the Stadt