circumstances which were at first believed to point to its having been
committed by Papists. A crowd of perjured witnesses, with Titus Gates at
their head, sprang like evil birds of the night into existence, ready to
swear away the lives of any number of innocent men. The panic flew
across the Channel. Irish Roman Catholics of all classes and ages were
arrested and flung into prison. Priests who had ventured to return were
ordered to quit the country at once. Men of stainless honour, whose only
crime was their faith, were on no provocation seized and subjected to
the most ignominious treatment, and in several instances put to death.
The case of Dr. Plunkett, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Armagh, a man
whom even Protestants regarded with the utmost reverence, is the most
notorious of these. Upon a ridiculous charge of being implicated in a
wholly mythical French descent, he was dragged over to London, summarily
sentenced, convicted, and hung, drawn, and quartered. Although the most
eminent, he was only one, however, of the victims of this most insane of
panics. Reason seemed to have been utterly lost. Blood and blood alone
could satisfy the popular craving, and victim after victim was hurried,
innocent but unpitied, to his doom.
At last the tide stayed. First slackened, then suddenly--in Ireland at
least--reversed itself, and ran almost as recklessly and as violently as
ever, only in the opposite direction. In 1685 Charles died, and James
now king, resolved with hardly an attempt at further concealment to
carry out his own long-cherished plans. From the beginning of his reign
his private determination seems to have been to make Ireland a
stronghold and refuge for his Roman Catholic subjects, in order that by
their aid he might make himself independent both of England and the
Parliament, and so carry out that despotism upon which his whole narrow,
obstinate soul was inflexibly set.
His first step was to recall the Duke of Ormond, whom Charles had left
as Viceroy, and to appoint in his place two Lords Justices, Lord Granard
and the Primate Boyle, who were likely, he believed, to be more
malleable. All tests were to be immediately done away with. Catholicism
was no longer to be a disqualification for office, and Roman Catholics
were to be appointed as judges. A more important change still, the army
was to be entirely remodelled; Protestant officers were to be summarily
dismissed, and Roman Catholic ones as summarily put in their places.
Such sweeping changes could not, even James found, be carried out all at
once. The Lords Justices were next dismissed, and his own
brother-in-law, Lord Clarendon, sent over as Lord-Lieutenant. He in turn
proving too timid, or too constitutional, his place was before long
filled by Richard Talbot, a fervent Catholic, but a man of indifferent
public honour and more than indifferent private character. Talbot was
created Earl of Tyrconnel, and arrived in 1686 avowedly to carry out the
new policy.
From this point the stream ran fast and strong. The recent innovations,
especially the re-organization of the army, had naturally caused immense
alarm amongst the whole Protestant colony. A petition drawn out by the
former proprietors and forwarded to the king against the Act of
Settlement had made them tremble also for their estates, and now this
new appointment came to put a climax to their dismay. What might not be
expected they asked in terror, under a man so unscrupulous and so
bigoted, with an army, too, composed mainly of Roman Catholics at his
back to enforce his orders? The departure of Clarendon was thus the
signal for a new Protestant exodus. Wild reports of a general massacre,
one which was to surpass the massacre of '41, flew through the land.
Terrified people flocked to the sea-coast and embarked in any boat they
could find for England. Those that remained behind drew themselves
together for their own defence within barricaded houses, and in the
towns in the north, especially in Enniskillen and Londonderry, the
Protestant inhabitants closed their gates and made ready to withstand
a siege.
Meanwhile in Dublin sentences of outlawry were fast being reversed, and
the estates of the Protestants being restored in all directions to their
former proprietors. The charters of the corporate towns were next
revoked, and new (by preference Catholic) aldermen and mayors appointed
by the viceroy. All Protestants were ordered to give up their arms by a
certain day, and to those who did not, "their lives and goods," it was
announced, "should be at the mercy and discretion of the soldiers."
These soldiers, now almost exclusively Catholic, lived at free quarters
upon the farms and estates of the Protestants. "Tories," lately out
"upon their keeping," with prices upon their heads, were now officers in
the king's service. The property of Protestants was seized all over the
country, their houses taken possession of, their sheep and cattle
slaughtered by hundreds of thousands. All who could manage to escape
made for the north, where the best Protestant manhood of the country had
now gathered together, and was standing resolutely in an attitude of
self-defence.
In England, William of Orange had meanwhile landed in Torbay, and James
had fled precipitately to France. Tyrconnel, who seems to have been
unprepared for this event, hesitated at first, undecided what to do or
how matters would eventually shape themselves. He even wrote to William,
professing to be rather favourable than otherwise to his cause, a
profession which the king, who was as yet anything but firm in his own
seat, seems to have listened to with some belief, and General Richard
Hamilton was sent over by him to negotiate matters with the viceroy.
The passions awakened on both sides were far too strong however, for any
such temporizing. Louis XIV. had received James upon his flight with
high honour, and his return to the throne was believed by his own
adherents to be imminent. In England, especially in London, the
excitement against the Irish Catholics was prodigious, and had been
increased by the crowd of Protestant refugees who had recently poured
in. The Irish regiments brought to England by James had been insultingly
disbanded, and their officers put under arrest. "Lilibullero," the
anti-Catholic street song, was sung by thousands of excited lips. Lord
Jefferies, who embodied in his own person all that the popular hatred
most detested in his master's rule, had been dragged to prison amid the
threatening howls of the populace. The "Irish night," during
which--though without the faintest shadow of reason--the London citizens
had fully believed an Irish mob to be in the act of marching upon the
town, with the set purpose of massacring every Protestant man, woman,
and child in it, had worked both town and nation to the highest possible
pitch of excitement. In Ireland too the stream had gone too far and too
fast to turn back. The minority and the majority stood facing one
another like a pair of pugilists. The Protestants, whose property had
been either seized or wasted, were fast concentrating themselves behind
Lough Foyle. Thither Tyrconnel sent Richard Hamilton--who, deserting
William, had thrown himself upon the other side--with orders to reduce
Londonderry before aid could arrive from England. To James himself
Tyrconnel wrote, urging him to start for Ireland without delay. Though
unprepared at present to furnish soldiers, Louis was munificent in other
respects. A fleet of fourteen men-of-war, with nine smaller vessels, was
provided. Arms, ammunition, and money without stint were placed at the
command of the exile, and a hundred French officers with the Count
d'Avaux, one of the king's most trusted officials, as envoy, were sent
to accompany the expedition. On March 12, 1689, James II. landed
at Kinsale.
XLIII.
WILLIAM AND JAMES IN IRELAND.
James's appearance in Ireland was hailed with a little deserved burst of
enthusiasm. As a king, as a Catholic, and as a man in deep misfortune,
he had a triple claim upon the kindly feeling of a race never slow to
respond to such appeals. All along the road from Cork to Dublin the
people ran out out in crowds to greet him with tears, blessings, and
cries of welcome. Women thronged the banks along the roadsides, and held
up their children to see him go by. Flowers--as to the poor quality of
which it was hardly worth Lord Macaulay's while, by the way, to speak so
disparagingly--were offered for his acceptance, or strewn under his
feet. Every mark of devotion which a desperately poor country could show
was shown without stint. Accompanied by the French ambassador, amid a
group of English exiles, and advancing under a waving roof of flags and
festoons, hastily improvised in his honour, the least worthy of the
Stuarts arrived in Dublin, and took up his residence at the castle.
His sojourn there was certainly no royal bed of roses! The dissensions
between his English and his Irish followers were not only deep, but
ineffaceable. By each the situation was regarded solely from the
standpoint of his own country. Was James to remain in Ireland and to be
an Irish king? or was he merely to use Ireland as a stepping-stone to
England? Between two such utterly diverse views no point of union was
discoverable.
In the interests of his own master, D'Avaux, the French envoy, strongly
supported Tyrconnel and the Irish leaders. The game of France was less
to replace James on the English throne than to make of Ireland a
permanent thorn in the side of England. With this view he urged James to
remain in Dublin, where he would necessarily be more under the direct
control of the parliament. James, however declined this advice, and
persisted in going north, where he would be within a few hours' sail of
Great Britain. Once Londonderry had fallen (and it was agreed upon all
hands that Londonderry could not hold out much longer), he could at any
moment cross to Scotland, where it was believed that his friends would
at once rally around him.
But Londonderry showed no symptoms of yielding. In April, 1689, James
appeared before its walls, believing that he had only to do so to
receive its submission. He soon found his mistake. Lundy, its governor,
was ready indeed to surrender it into his hands, but the townsfolk
declined the bargain, and shut their gates resolutely in the king's
face. Lundy escaped for his life over the walls, and James, in disgust,
returned to Dublin, leaving the conduct of the siege in the hands of
Richard Hamilton, who was afterwards superseded in the command by De
Rosen, a Muscovite in the pay of France, who prosecuted it with a
barbarity unknown to the annals of civilized warfare.
The tale of that heroic defence has been so told that it need assuredly
never, while the world lasts, be told again. Suffice it then that
despite the falseness of its governor, the weakness of its walls, the
lack of any military training on the part of its defenders; despite the
treacherous dismissal of the first ships sent to its assistance; despite
the long agony of seeing other ships containing provisions hanging
inertly at the mouth of the bay; despite shot and shell without, and
famine in its most grisly forms within--despite all this the little
garrison held gallantly on to the "last ounce of horse-flesh and the
last pinch of corn." At length, upon the 105th day of the siege, three
ships, under Kirke's command, broke through the boom in the channel, and
brought their freights in safety to the starved and ghastly defenders,
gathered like ghosts, rather than human beings, upon the quay. Three
days later De Rosen broke up his camp, and moved off in disgust, leaving
behind him the little city, exhausted but triumphant, having saved the
honour of its walls, and won itself imperishable fame.
While all this was going on in the north, James, in Dublin, had been
busily employed in deluging the country with base money to supply his
own necessities, with the natural result of ruining all who were forced
to accept it. At the same time the Parliament under his nominal
superintendence had settled down to the congenial task of reversing most
of the earlier Acts, and putting everything upon an entirely new
footing. It was a Parliament composed, as was natural, almost wholly of
Roman Catholics, only six Protestants having been returned. Its first
task was to repeal Poynings Act, the Act, which, it will be remembered,
was passed in Henry VII.'s reign, binding it independence upon the
English Parliament. Its next to establish freedom of worship, giving the
Roman Catholic tithes to the priests. So far no objections could
reasonably be raised. Next, however, followed the question of
forfeitures. The hated Act of Settlement, upon which all property in
Ireland was now based, was set aside, and it was setted that all lands
should revert to their former proprietors. Then followed the punishment
of the political adversaries. "The hugest Bill of attainder," says Mr.
Green, "the world has seen," was hastily drawn up and passed. By its
provisions over 2,240 persons were attained, and everything that they
possessed vested in the king. Many so attained were either women or
young children, indeed a large proportion of the names seem to have been
inserted at haphazard or from some merely momentary feeling of anger or
vindictiveness.
These Acts were perhaps only what is called natural, but it must be
owned that they were also terribly unfortunate. Up to that date those
directly penal laws against Catholics which afterwards disfigured the
statute book were practically unknown. A Catholic could sit in either
Irish House of Parliament; he could inherit lands, and bequeath them to
whom he would; he could educate his children how and where he liked. The
terror planted in the breast of the Protestant colony by that
inoperative piece of legislation found its voice in the equally violent,
but unfortunately not equally inoperative, passed Acts by them in the
hour of _their_ triumph. Acts, by means of which it was fondly hoped
that their enemies would be thrown into such a position of dependence
and humiliation that they could never again rise up to be a peril.
In the north a brilliant little victory had meanwhile been won by the
Enniskillen troops under Colonel Wolseley, at Newtown Butler, where they
attacked a much larger force of the enemy and defeated them, killing a
large number and driving the rest back in confusion. William was still
detained in England, but had despatched the Duke of Schomberg with a
considerable force. Schomberg's men, were mostly raw recruits, and the
climate tried them severely. He arrived in the autumn, but not venturing
to take the field, established himself at Dundalk, where his men
misbehaved and all but mutinied, and where, a pestilence shortly
afterwards breaking out, swept them away in multitudes.
On both sides, indeed, the disorganization of the armies was great.
Fresh reinforcements had arrived for James, under the Comte de Lauzan,
in return for which an equal number of Irish soldiers under Colonel
Macarthy had been drafted for service to France. In June, 1690, William
himself landed at Carrickfergus with an army of 35,000 men, composed of
nearly every nationality in Europe--Swedes, Dutch, Swiss, Batavians,
French Huguenots, Finns, with about 15,000 English soldiers. He came up
to James's army upon the banks of the Boyne, about twenty miles from
Dublin, and here it was that the turning battle of the campaign
was fought.
This battle James watched at a discreet distance from the hill of
Donore. The Irish foot, upon whom the brunt of the action fell, were
untrained, indifferently armed, and had never before been in action;
their opponents were veterans trained in European wars. They were driven
back, fled, and a considerable number of them slaughtered. The Irish
cavalry stood firm, but their valour was powerless to turn the day.
Schomberg was killed, but William remained absolute and undisputed
master of the field.
At the first shock of reverse James flew down the hill and betook
himself to Dublin. He arrived there foaming and almost convulsed with
rage. "Madam, your countrymen have run away!" was his gracious address
to Lady Tyrconnel. "If they have, sire, your Majesty seems to have won
the race," was that lady's ready retort.
The king's flight was without reason or measure. As before in England,
so now, he seemed to pass in a moment from insane self-confidence to an
equally insane panic. He fled south, ordering the bridges to be broken
down behind him; took boat at Waterford, and never rested until he found
himself once more safe upon French soil.
His flight at least left the field clear for better men. Patrick
Sarsfield now took the principal command, and prosecuted the campaign
with a vigour of which it had hitherto shown no symptoms. Sarsfield is
the one redeeming figure upon the Jacobite side. His gallant presence
sheds a ray of chivalric light upon this otherwise gloomiest and least
attractive of campaigns. He could not turn defeat to victory, but he
could, and did succeed in snatching honour out of that pit into which
the other leaders, and especially his master, had let it drop. Brave,
honourable, upright, "a gentleman of eminent merit," is praise which
even those least inclined to favour his side of the quarrel bestow upon
him without stint.
William, now established in Dublin, issued a proclamation offering full
and free pardon to all who would lay down their arms. He was genuinely
anxious to avoid pushing the struggle to the bitter end, and to hinder
further bloodshed. Though deserted by their king, and fresh from
overwhelming defeat, the Irish troops showed no disposition, however, of
yielding. Athlone, Galway, Cork, Kinsale, and Limerick still held out,
and behind the walls of the last named the remains of James's broken
army was now chiefly collected. Those walls, however, were miserably
weak, and the French generals utterly scouted the possibility of their
being held. Tyrconnel, too, advised a capitulation, but Sarsfield
insisted upon holding the town, and the Irish soldiers--burning to wipe
out the shame of the Boyne--supported him like one man. William was
known, to be moving south to the attack, and accordingly Lauzan and
Tyrconnel, with the rest of the French troops moved hastily away to
Galway, leaving Sarsfield to defend Limerick as he could.
They had hardly left before William's army appeared in sight with the
king himself at their head, and drew up before the walls. A formidable
siege train, sent after him from Dublin, was to follow in a day or two.
Had it arrived it would have finished the siege at once. Sarsfield
accordingly slipped out of the town under cover of night, fell upon it
while it was on its way through the Silvermine Hills in Tipperary,
killed some sixty of the men who were in charge, and filling the cannons
with powder, burst them with an explosion which startled the country
round for miles, and the roar of which is said to have reached William
in his camp before Limerick.
This brilliant little feat delayed the siege. Nevertheless it was
pressed on with great vigour. Two more guns were obtained, several of
the outworks carried, and a breach began to show in the ramparts. It was
now autumn, the rainy season was setting in, and William's presence was
urgently wanted in England. After another violent attempt, therefore, to
take the town, which was resisted with the most desperate valour, the
very women joining in the fight, and remaining under the hottest fire,
the besiegers drew off, and William shortly afterwards sailed for
England, leaving the command in the hands of Ginkel, the ablest of his
Dutch generals.
This first siege of Limerick is in many respects a very remarkable one,
and bears a close analogy to the yet more famous siege of Londonderry.
To give the parallel in Lord Macaulay's words--"The southern city," he
says "was, like the northern city, the last asylum of a Church and of a
nation. Both places were crowded by fugitives from all parts of Ireland.
Both places appeared to men who had made a regular study of the art of
war incapable of resisting an enemy.... In both cases, religious and
patriotic enthusiasm struggled unassisted against great odds; in both
cases, religious and patriotic enthusiasm did what veteran warriors had
pronounced it absurd to attempt."
In Galway, meanwhile, violent quarrels had broken out. The French troops
were sick, naturally enough, of the campaign, and not long afterwards
sailed for France. Their places were taken later on by another body of
French soldiers under General St. Ruth. St. Ruth was a man of cold,
disdainful temperament, but a good officer. He at once set to work at
the task of restoring order and getting the army into a condition to
take the field. Early in the spring Ginkel had collected his army in
Mullingar ready to march to the assault of Athlone, the ancient Norman
fortress, upon the bank of the Shannon, which was here spanned by a
single bridge. Upon Ginkel's advance this bridge was broken down, and
the besieged and besiegers were separated therefore by the breadth of
the river. After an unsuccessful attempt to repair the breach the Dutch
general resolved to ford the latter. As it happened the water was
unusually low, and although St. Ruth with a large force was at the time
only a mile away, he, unaccountably, made no attempt to defend the ford.
A party of Ginkel's men waded or swam across in the dark, caught the
broken end of the bridge, and held it till it was repaired. This done,
the whole English army poured across the river.
The struggle was now narrowing fast. Leaving Athlone Ginkel advanced to
Ballinasloe, so well-known now from its annual sheep fairs. The country
here is all but a dead flat, but the French general took advantage of
some rising ground on the slope of which stood the ruined castle of
Aughrim. Here the Irish were posted by him in force, one of those deep
brown bogs which cover so much of the surface of Galway lying at their
feet and surrounding them upon two sides.
The battle which broke at five o'clock the next morning was a desperate
one. Roused at last from his coldness St. Ruth appealed in the most
moving terms to the officers and men to fight for their religion, their
liberties, their honour. His appeal was gallantly responded to. A low
stone breast-work had been raised upon the hillside in front of the
Irish, and against this Ginkel's veterans again and again advanced to
the attack, and again and again were beaten back, broken and, in one
instance, chased down the hill on to the plain. St. Ruth broke into
vehement enthusiasm. "The day," he cried, waving his hat in the air, "is
ours, gentlemen!" A party of Huguenot cavalry, however, were presently
seen to be advancing across the bog so as to turn the flank of the Irish
army. It seemed to be impossible that they could get through, but the
ground was firmer than at first appeared, and some hurdles thrown down
in front of them formed a sort of rude causeway. St. Ruth flew to the
point of danger. On his way he was struck by a cannon ball which carried
off his head, and the army was thus left without a general. Sarsfield
was at some distance with the reserve. There was no one to give any
orders. The breast-work was carried. The Irish fought doggedly,
retreating slowly from enclosure to enclosure. At last, left to
themselves, with no one to direct or support them, they broke and fled
down the hill. Then followed a hideous butchery. Few or no prisoners
were taken, and the number of the slain is stated to have been "in
proportion to the number engaged greater than in any other battle of
that age." An eye-witness who looked from the hill the next day said
that the country for miles around was whitened with the naked bodies of
the slain. It looked, he remarked with grim vividness, like an immense
pasture covered with flocks of sheep!
[Illustration: INITIAL LETTER FROM THE BOOK OF KELLS.]
XLIV.
THE TREATY OF LIMERICK.