CHAP.

IX.

1688.

He

that the world had then seen the Irish were almost as
rude as the savages of Labrador.
of Labrador. He was a freeman:
the Irish were the hereditary serfs of his race.
worshipped God after a pure and rational fashion: the
Irish were sunk in idolatry and superstition. He knew
that great numbers of Irish had repeatedly fled before a
small English force, and that the whole Irish population
had been held down by a small English colony; and he
very complacently inferred that he was naturally a being
of a higher order than the Irishman: for it is thus
that a dominant race always explains its ascendency
and excuses its tyranny. That in vivacity, humour, and
eloquence, the Irish stand high among the nations of the
world is now universally acknowledged. That, when
well disciplined, they are excellent soldiers has been
proved on a hundred fields of battle. Yet it is certain
that, a century and a half ago, they were generally
despised in our island as both a stupid and a cowardly
people. And these were the men who were to hold
England down by main force while her civil and eccle-
siastical constitution was destroyed. The blood of the
whole nation boiled at the thought. To be conquered
by Frenchmen or by Spaniards would have seemed
comparatively a tolerable fate. With Frenchmen and
Spaniards we had been accustomed to treat on equal
terms. We had sometimes envied their prosperity, some-
times dreaded their power, sometimes congratulated our-
selves on their friendship. In spite of our unsocial pride,
we admitted that they were great nations, and that
they could boast of men eminent in the arts of war and
peace. But to be subjugated by an inferior caste was a
degradation beyond all other degradation. The English
felt as the white inhabitants of Charleston and New
Orleans would feel if those towns were occupied by
negro garrisons. The real facts would have been suffi-
cient to excite uneasiness and indignation: but the real
facts were lost amidst a crowd of wild rumours which

IX.

1688.

flew without ceasing from coffeehouse to coffeehouse and CHAP. from alebench to alebench, and became more wonderful and terrible at every stage of the progress. The number of the Irish troops who had landed on our shores might justly 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 offences 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 waggons, 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 favourite 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 defenceless 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

CHAP.
IX.

1688.

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 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 recognised, the rabble shouted, "Room for the Irish Ambassadors;" 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

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

† Secret Consults of the Romish Party in Ireland.

IX.

a foreign and a subject race. The Duke of Berwick, CHAP. who was Colonel of the Eighth Regiment of the Line, then quartered at Portsmouth, gave orders that thirty 1688. 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 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 therefore do not think it consistent with our honour 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 despatched a troop of horse to Portsmouth with orders to bring the six refractory officers before him. A council of war sate 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 founded rumour that, while under arrest, they had been treated with cruelty.*

Desertion,

18

History of the 1689; compare the first and second editions; Barillon, Sept. . 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 thou-
sand fictions invented at Saint Ger-
mains 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

CHAP.

IX.

1688. Lillibul

lero.

vent.

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 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 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 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 afterwards 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.

of his sense would have urged the
members of a council of war to in-
flict a punishment which was noto-
riously beyond their competence.

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.