in a manner not to be mistaken. Tyrconnel had transmitted 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.

to defend his majesty's crown in a time of danger. We had then no difficulty in procuring hundreds of English recruits. We can easily keep every company up to its full complement without admitting Irishmen. We there fore do not think it consistent with our honor to have these strangers forced on us; and we beg that we may either be permitted to command men of our own nation, or to lay down our commissions." Berwick sent to Windsor for directions. The king, greatly exasperated, instantly dispatched a troop of horse to Portsmouth with orders to bring the six refractory officers before him. A council of war sat on them. They refused to make any submission, and they were sentenced to be cashiered, the highest punishment which a court martial was then competent to inflict. The whole nation applauded the disgraced officers; and the prevailing sentiment was stimulated by an unfounded rumor that, while under arrest, they had been treated with cruelty.*

Public feeling did not then manifest itself by those signs with which we are familiar, by large meetings, and by vehement harangues. Nevertheless, it found a vent. Thomas Wharton, who, in the last Parliament, had represented Buckinghamshire, and who was already conspicuous both as a libertine and as a Whig, had written a satirical ballad on the administration of Tyrconnel. In this little poem an Irishman congratulates a brother Irishman, in a barbarous jargon, on the approaching triumph

History of the Desertion, 1689; compare the first and second editions; Barillon, Sept. 1, 1688; Citters of the same date; Clarke's Life of James the Second, ii., 168. The compiler of the last-mentioned work says that Churchill moved the court to sentence the six officers to death. This story does not appear to have been taken from the king's papers; I therefore regard it as one of the thousand fictions invented at St. Germain's for the purpose of blackening a character which was black enough without such daubing. That Churchill may have affected great indignation on this occasion, in order to hide the treason which he meditated, is highly probable. But it is impossible to believe that a man of his sense would have urged the members of a council of war to inflict a punishment which was notoriously beyond their competence.

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. The 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.*

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 Revolution.

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 persecuted, 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

house, flung themselves on their knees, described with tears and sobs the lamentable condition of those whom they most loved, and besought the intercession of the magistrates. The pulpits resounded with invectives and lamentations. The press poured forth heart-rending narratives and stirring exhortations. Avaux saw the whole danger. He reported to his court that even the well-intentioned for so he always called the enemies of the house of Orange-either partook of the public feeling, or were overawed by it, and he suggested the policy of making some concession to their wishes. The answers which he received from Versailles were cold and acrimonious. Some Dutch families, indeed, which had not been naturalized in France, were permitted to return to their country. But to those natives of Holland who had obtained letters of naturalization Louis refused all indulgence. No power on earth, he said, should interfere between him and his subjects. These people had chosen to become his subjects; and how he treated them was a matter with which no neighboring state had any thing to do. The magistrates of Amsterdam naturally resented the scornful ingratitude of the potentate whom they had strenuously and unscrupulously served against the general sense of their own countrymen. Soon followed another provocation which they felt even more keenly. Louis began to make war on their trade. He first put forth an edict prohibiting the importation of herrings into his dominions. Avaux hastened to inform his court that this step had excited great alarm and indignation; that sixty thousand persons in the United Provinces subsisted by the herring fishery, and that some strong measure of retaliation would probably be adopted by the States. The answer which he received was, that the king was determined not only to persist, but to increase the duties on many of those articles in which Holland carried on a lucrative trade with France. The consequence of these errors-errors committed in defiance of repeated warnings, and, as it should seem, in the mere wantonness of self-will-was, that now, when the