at the same time that they direct military assistance to be given at the requisition of the civil magistrate, positively forbid the troops to act (but in case of attack) without his presence and authority; and the most clear and precise orders are to be given to the officer commanding the party for this purpose."

These strictures produced, as might have been expected, wave of rage in Government circles, and a cabal against him was accordingly hatched. An honest man had been appointed by mistake, but it must be confessed in justice to the Government that the regrettable blunder was speedily repaired; for soon afterwards, thwarted at every step by the tortuous intrigues of unscrupulous enemies, he resigned his post in disgust, and his resignation completed the fatal policy which the recall of Fitzwilliam had inaugurated and destroyed the last possibility of averting the catastrophe of 1798. It was not wonderful, indeed, that Abercrombie was unsuited to the taste of the Ascendency. He had declared that its gentry were uneducated—“ Only occupied in eating and drinking and uttering their unmanly fears. They know that they have been oppressors of the poor, and that a day of vengeance is at hand."

He stated that-" Within these twelve months every crime, every cruelty that could be committed by Cossacks and Calmucks has been committed here."

On April 23, 1798, he wrote to his son

"The late ridiculous farce" (i. e. orders to crush the Catholic rebellion) "acted by Lord Camden and his Cabinet must strike every one. They have declared the country in rebellion when the orders of his Excellency might be carried over the whole country by an orderly dragoon, or a writ executed without any difficulty, a few places in the mountains excepted."

Pelham,1 the Chief Secretary, was the next to leave Ireland. He, too, had tried to swim against the stream of corruption and persecution and the policy of goading the Irish to madness, but in vain; and preferring to abandon his post to sacrificing his honour retired from the country on the eve of the rebellion. Castlereagh took his place at Dublin, at first in the capacity of a locum tenens and afterwards officially as Chief Secretary, and inaugurated that policy of political malignity which conferred upon him the rare and unenviable distinction of being, at the time of his death, equally feared and execrated on both sides of the Irish Channel. Abercrombie was succeeded by General Lake, who immediately threw himself into the arms of those very abuses which the former had attempted to check. The

1 Thomas Pelham, afterwards second Earl of Chicester, Chief Secretary to Lord Camden in Pitt's Ministry.

* Gerard Lake, first Viscount Lake of Delhi and Leswarree (1744-1808).

whole country was placed under martial law on March 30, and the atrocities of the military thus encouraged surpassed what can be decently set down in narrative. The country, which up till now had been comparatively quiet, was goaded to madness. Hanging and shooting were regarded as over-merciful, and fearful floggings, often a thousand lashes which tore off skin and muscles, were inflicted on the bare suspicion of anti-Ascendency sympathies: and who, in God's name, was not entitled to such sympathies in the face of this appalling provocation? To extort confessions, the son was compelled to kneel under the father while the latter was being flogged, and the father under the son, whilst the blood spurted out upon them hot from the lash. Halfhanging was another form of torture, and picketing a third-a peculiarly diabolical invention by which the victim, strung up by one arm, was made to rest the weight of his body with bare foot upon a pointed stake. Hot pitch was poured into canvas caps which were pressed on the heads of the wretched sufferers and could not be removed from the inflamed and blistered surface without tearing off both hair and skin. To devise new methods of ingenious torture for the Catholics was the amusement of the Protestants during those leisure hours in which the body, wearied by the physical infliction of torment upon the Catholic victims, surrendered its energies to the brain. Was it extraordinary that human nature should rise up against such treatment, or that rebellion should have been embraced by the Catholics as the last escape from the extremity of their afflictions? Accumulated evidence bears witness to the sufferings of these poor people at the hands of a brutal soldiery, and the callous indifference manifested towards these outrages by the officers in command. Lord Holland, in his Memoirs, writes that

"Many were sold at so much a head to the Prussians. The fact is incontrovertible the people of Ireland were driven into resistance, which possibly they meditated before, by the free quarters and the excesses of the soldiers, which were such as are not permitted in civilized warfare, even in an enemy's country."

In speaking of Wicklow, where he had been chiefly employed, Sir John Moore said

"That moderate treatment by the generals, and the preventing of the troops from pillaging and molesting the people would soon restore tranquillity, and the latter would certainly be quiet if the gentry and yeomen would only behave with tolerable decency, and not seek to gratify their ill-humour and revenge upon the poor."

Major-General William Napier, commenting in the Edinburgh Review, on the life of Sir John Moore, and the indignation always expressed by the latter at the cruelties perpetrated by

the troops, and dwelling upon his own recollections at that period, wrote

"What manner of soldiers were thus let loose upon the wretched districts which the Ascendency-men were pleased to call disaffected? They were men, to use the venerable Abercrombie's words, who were formidable to everybody but the enemy.' We ourselves were young at the time; yet being connected with the army, we were continually amongst the soldiers, listening with boyish eagerness to their conversation, and we well remember-and with horror to this day-the tales of lust, and blood, and pillage-the record of their own actions. against the miserable peasantry-which they used to relate."

In the Life of Lord Plunket there is the following description of a deed of savagery

"A justice of the peace for the county of Antrim, who was also a colonel of Yeomanry, added to many other vices a libertinism which he practised heartlessly among the wives and daughters of his poorer tenantry. One of his victims, a poor girl of eighteen, finding herself in a condition in which she had a claim at least for the protection of her seducer, applied to him for assistance. He not only refused this, but, on some frivolous pretext of complicity with the rebels, handed her over to his troops to be scourged. His brutal order was only too faithfully carried out. The poor woman died almost immediately after the infliction of the torture, having given birth to a still-born child."

These atrocities, which might have shamed a Gunga Govin Singh, drove thousands of the Irish from a desperate sense of self-preservation into the asylum offered by the ranks of the United Irishmen. There was a short and ominous lull in Ulster before the storm, during which the conspiracy silently spread and the ranks of the United Irish filled, and then the great rebellion, which might never have occurred had Ireland been governed on Grattan's instead of on Clare's principles, and the Irish people not been hounded to desperation by a deliberate policy of cruel persecution, burst through its sluices and swept over the land.1

During the summer of 1797 a secretly-printed newspaper appeared, called the Union Star, with a man named Cox as editor, and openly advocated assassination. In December 1797 Cox turned informer, and told Cooke, the Under-Secretary, that Lord Edward Fitzgerald and Arthur O'Connor were acquainted with him and approved his designs. Through the activity of 1 Appendix XIVc, quotations from Dr. Madden, the report of the Secret Committee of Lords, and Lady Sarah Napier.

Thomas Reynolds, the Government spy, and others, the arrest of thirteen delegates of the United Irishmen took place at Oliver Bond's house on March 12, 1798. May 23 was the date finally fixed for the general rising simultaneously in the four provinces. On May II the Government issued a proclamation offering a reward of £1,000 for Lord Edward's apprehension, and it was this offer that led to his capture on the information either of the Government spy, Francis Higgins, known as the "Sham Squire," and proprietor of the Freeman's Journal, or Francis Magan, the barrister. It had been decided to seize Lord Edward on his way to visit Magan from Thomas Street to Usher's Island, where the latter lived. The Town-Major, Sirr, with this object, posted his men in two parties, so as to intercept Fitzgerald and his comrades by whichever of the alternative routes they might choose. There was a fierce scuffle, and Fitzgerald escaped to the house of Murphy, a feather-merchant, where he had been given shelter before. His freedom, however, lasted but a short time, and he was finally captured on May 19, in Murphy's house in Thomas Street. He was lying in bed, with his coat off, when Town-Major Swan and Captain Ryan entered the room. He had in his hand a weapon which belonged probably to his negro servant, consisting of a strong blade, with a double waving edge, stuck in a coarse buck-horn handle. He severely wounded Swan, and stabbed Ryan mortally in the abdomen, when a shot fired from behind the door by Sirr disabled him. While thus helpless he received a sabre-wound across the neck. He died in prison of the wounds he had received, on June 9, 1798.1

No means were spared to stifle every suspect. Captain Armstrong, an officer of the Kildare Militia, particularly distinguished himself in effecting the conviction of two brothers named John and Henry Sheares. Castlereagh had persuaded Armstrong to dine with these men at their house in Dublin in order to take advantage of his intimacy with them and to extract from their hospitable confidence and convivial expansion of heart sufficient information to convict and hang them. This he proceeded to do with an exemplary attention to instructions on

1 William Cobbett told Pitt that Lord Edward Fitzgerald was "a most humane and excellent man and the only really honest officer he had ever known." His widow Pamela married the American Consul at Hamburg, and was afterwards separated from him. She died at length worth only £100. The Consul paid her debts, and the funeral was provided by her old playfellow, Madame Adelaide.

2

John Mitchel in his History of Ireland has the following passage-"In his (Captain Armstrong's) interview with Dr. Madden, touching some alleged inaccuracies in the work of the latter, he denied having caressed any children at Sheares'. He said he never recollected having seen the children at all; but there was a young lady of about fifteen there, whom he met at dinner. The day he dined there (and he dined there only once), he was urged by Lord Castlereagh to do so. It was wrong to do so, and he (Captain Armstrong) was sorry for it; but he was persuaded by Lord Castlereagh to go there to dine, for the purpose of getting further information.""

Sunday, May 20, 1798, sitting at the table of his hosts in the company of the two brothers, their aged mother, their sister, and the wife of one of them, who after dinner played to him on the harp. Having accumulated sufficient evidence for his purpose, the smiling fiend, gorged with food and loaded with kindness, then slunk from their roof and went out into the night. The next morning the Sheares were arrested, and soon afterwards hanged-a deed that for its low-bred and cowardly infamy has few equals in the history of any government.

The comparative tranquillity of Ulster during the greater period of the rising was due principally to the military government established there, the enthusiasm of the Orangemen, the failure of the French expedition to effect a landing, and in a minor degree, to what was considered the scurvy treatment of America by France, who had claimed the right to search and seize enemies' goods on board neutral vessels. After a period of protracted and painful suspense English reinforcements began to arrive in Ireland in June, and the rebel Irish were gradually drowned in their own revolutionary blood. No attempt was made to discriminate between the innocent and guilty. Every Catholic was deemed a traitor, every Protestant a loyalist in this carnival of butchery.

General Lake wrote to Castlereagh

"

“The carnage was dreadful; the determination of the troops to destroy every one they think a rebel is beyond description.' Gordon, a Protestant clergyman, in his History of the Rebellion, says—

"I have reason to think more men than fell in battle were slain in cold blood. No quarter was given to persons taken prisoners as rebels, with or without arms."

On July 8, 1798, Cornwallis wrote to the Duke of Portland

"The Irish Militia are totally without discipline, contemptible before the enemy when any serious resistance is made to them, but ferocious and cruel in the extreme when any poor wretches, either with or without arms, come within their power-in short, murder appears to be their favourite pastime."

On July 24 of the same year he wrote to Major-General Ross

"The Yeomanry are in the style of the Loyalists in America, only much more numerous and powerful, and a thousand times more ferocious . These men have saved the country, but they now take the lead in rapine and murder. The Irish Militia, with few officers, and those chiefly of the worst kinds, follow closely on the heels of the Yeomanry in murder and every kind of atrocity, and the fencibles take a share, although