profligate monarchs that ever disgraced the throne of England. And thus the leaders of that large, powerful, and respectable party that struggled for the liberties of the English nation, actually paved the way for a far worse state of things than existed at the period when the contest commenced. To their intemperance, imprudence, and deficiency of political foresight, their country owed all its sufferings under the scandalous reign of Charles II. the very worst of the despicable race of the Stuarts. Had they stopped short, when they drew the teeth, and pared the nails, of despotism,-when they traced the strong line of demarcation between tyranny on one side, and anarchy on the other, they would have deserved eternal remembrance, and have conferred lasting and inestimable blessings on their country. Their improvidence places at their door, all the havoc and ruin, the demoralization, and destruction, of a seven years' war, -the failure of a noble experiment in favour of the rights of human nature, as well as the triumph they afforded to the friends of absolute power, by the odious abuse of liberty. These stains can never be washed away.

What, nevertheless, has been the result as to the actors on this stage?

They are to this day regarded with the highest veneration, by the most enlightened part of mankind. Their numerous follies, their vices, their crimes, are buried in eternal oblivion. Their resistance to lawless tyranny has immortalized them.

The Irish, at the same period, suffered almost every species of the most grinding, odious, and revolting despotism that can be conceived. They were subjected to heavy penalties, for worshipping God according to the dictates of their consciences, or for not attending on a worship which they believed heretical; they were robbed of their estates by high-handed and flagitious tyranny and fraud; they were subject to martial law, with all its horrors, in time of profound peace; their juries were ruinously fined, and mutilated in their persons, for

*It requires but little reflection or observation, to discover a considerable resemblance between the issue of this contest, and that of the late revolution in France: and that the leaders in both countries committed exactly the same species of error, with results not very dissimilar. Had the parliament of England stopped short at the point stated in the text, the liberties of that nation would have been placed in 1642, on a far better and more secure foundation, than they acquired at the so-much-extolled revolution in 1688, when, on the abdication of the bigot James, they called in a foreign prince to rule them, with scarcely any stipulation in favour of liberty. And it is equally obvious, that had the French leaders rested content with the constitution which bestowed on the king a veto on the acts of the legislature, similar to what exists in England or the United States, the nation and the world at large would have been prodigiously benefited: and an incalculable waste of human happiness and wealth, rivers of blood, and millions of lives, would have been spared. But, according to the wise aphorism of the ex-president Adams, "Every age will make experience for itself."

not finding verdicts against the plainest dictates of justice; their churches were demolished, or rapaciously seized by their oppressors; their children were torn from their natural guardians, and transferred to the care of worthless strangers, who squandered their estates, and brought them up in habits of licentiousness:-in a word, it is difficult to conceive of any species of oppression which they did not endure.

They were goaded into insurrection. And if ever resistance of lawless outrage and tyranny were loudly and imperiously called for, -if ever the standard of freedom claimed the sympathies of mankind, the Irish standard had an indisputable title to it. And what has been the result? Their most illustrious families were reduced to beggary; their estates, to the amount of millions of acres, were confiscated; above half a million of the natives were slaughtered, banished, or perished by famine and plague,579 the consequences of the ruthless and savage ferocity with which they were pursued by their enemies. They were covered with obloquy and abuse, during their lives; their memory has been detested; and the crimes falsely alleged against them, have been visited upon their descendants to the fourth and fifth generation, in the odious form of the vile code of laws, "to prevent the growth of Popery."

The monstrous, absurd, improbable, and impossible legends of the massacre by the Irish, I shall fully investigate in a future chapter. I now confine myself to the simple circumstance of the insurrection itself, devested of all its horrors, real or pretended. And I dare aver, that if ever, from the creation of the world, there was a holy, sacred insurrection, an insurrection warranted by every law, divine or human, this was pre-eminently justified. Further: if the leaders of the Irish insurgents, who attempted to emancipate themselves from the tyranny of England, were traitors and rebels, then were William Tell, Maurice, Prince of Orange, Pym, Hambden, and Sydney, traitors and rebels. One step further: if these Irishmen were traitors and rebels, Randolph, Henry, Hancock, Adams, Dickinson, Livingston, Lee, Rutledge, Clinton, and Washington himself, were traitors and rebels; and not merely traitors and rebels, but traitors and rebels of the most atrocious kind; as the difference between the grievances that Washington and his illustrious compeers rose to redress, and those under which Ireland groaned, is very nearly as great as that between the liberty and happiness of an American citizen, and the abject state of the subjects of Turkish despotism. Indeed, if the Irish insurgents were traitors and rebels, then every man, in every age and country, without a single exception, who ever dared to raise his arm against oppression, was a traitor and a rebel.

This is strong language, which will doubtless be in direct hostility with the prejudices of a large portion of my readers. From their prejudices I appeal to their reason and candour; and if the decision be made by these respectable arbiters, I feel no doubt about the issue. For, to confine myself to the American revolution, will any man, not lost to decency or common sense, dare to commit himself, by comparing the grievances of America with those of Ireland ?-a three-penny

tax on tea, with the court of wards, the star-chamber, the high-commission court, the flagitious plunder of half the province of Ulster, the rapine perpetrated in the province of Connaught, the persecution of their religion, the seizure of their churches, the banishment of their priests, the restriction of their trade, the execution of martial law, in a word, the endless detail of the most grievous oppression on record? If then the despotic and lawless imposition of a paltry tax on tea, warranted the subject in drawing the sword, and commencing a civil war, surely the oppressions of Ireland warranted it inexpressibly more. Indeed, it may be averred, and the decision submitted to any bar of enlightened men in Christendom, that were all the oppressions suffered by the American provinces, from the first landing of the pilgrims to the declaration of independence, aggregated into one solid mass, and all the oppressions of England, under the Stuarts, thrown in to swell the amount, they would not equal the grievances suffered by the Irish, during the reigns of James I. and. Charles I. And it is, moreover, hardly possible to find, in the history of Ireland, from the invasion of Henry II. till the Union, any five consecutive years, in which the Irish had not greater ground for insurrection and resistance to the English government, than England could plead in 1688, or America in 1775 or 1776.

1

CHAPTER XX.

The age of forgery, plots, perjury, and imposture. Plot for the mur der of certain lords. For the murder of one hundred and eight members of both houses. Oates's plot. Dangerfield. Bedlow. Notorious perjury against bishop Plunket. Letter dropping.

"Beware of him:

Sin, death and hell have set their marks on him

And all their ministers attend on him."-Shakspeare.

"A lie, believed for an hour, doth many times in a nation produce events of seven years continuance."-Cardinal Lorraine.

ALTHOUGH this division of the work was intended to be confined to the nineteen years from the commencement of the insurrection to the restoration, yet in the present chapter, in order to bring the odious subject under one coup-d'œil, I shall take the liberty to depart from that arrangement, and present a view of some of the various plots fabricated during the whole century for the purpose of destroying the reputation, and affording a pretext to depredate on the property of the Roman Catholics.

Every age of the world is characterised by some peculiar folly or wickedness, which distinguishes it from those which have preceded, as well as from those which follow, with nearly as much accuracy as the varied features of the face distinguish one man from another.

Any impartial, enlightened reader, called-upon to fix the peculiar feature of the seventeenth century, in the wide range of the British dominions, would, without hesitation, pronounce it to have been the age of forgery, perjury, and fabricated plots, contrived for the purpose of overwhelming the innocent in ruin, and enriching malefactors with their spoils.

It is hardly credible, at the present day, when the dire passions which actuated so large a portion of the community in England and Ireland, during that period, have wholly subsided, and are now almost inconceivable, what a number of these contrivances were employed; how regularly they succeeded each other; what mischievous consequences they produced; and yet how excessively stupid the most of them were. Many of them, which were devoured with greedy ears by the great and little vulgar, were so ridiculous, so absurd, and so utterly improbable, that, at the present day, they would not impose on a gang of swine-herds.

Previously to entering into the examination and detection of the miserable pretended conspiracy of 1641, which led to scenes of horror, desolation, and massacre of the Irish, that chill the blood in the

*Titus Oates.

The cardinal did not place his position on the strong ground to which it might lay claim. Some of the "lies" told in 1641, 2, 3, and 4, have produced consequences for nearly two centuries, and their operation may extend to centuries to come, and to the posterity of children yet unborn.

veins, I shall present various facts, to satisfy the reader that the fabrication of pretended plots was a regular trade, pursued upon a most extensive scale; was one of the levers by which the movements of the political machine were regulated; and that consistency, coherence, probability, or even possibility, were not necessary to ensure

success.

I have already established the efficacy of this infamous system, in producing confiscation in Ireland; and how thousands were involved in ruin, and their posterity for ages consigned to poverty, by the dropping of a wretched catchpenny letter in the reign of James I. Tyrone, a nobleman of high grade and princely possessions among the Irish, after having rendered important services to the state, and received a wound, fighting in its defence against his own countrymen, was almost immediately charged with a conspiracy, on grounds the most frivolous and contemptible, merely from the lust of spoliating his immense estate. The same vile course was pursued with Shane O'Nial, whose estate was finally confiscated, after he was basely assassinated, at the instigation of the lord deputy.

The low herd of hardened wretches, who perjured themselves by swearing to those plots, as well as those of the higher orders, equally hardened, who suborned them for this execrable purpose,* felt no compunctious visitings" of remorse, that torrents of blood were occasionally shed, through the means of their perjuries.

66

"Their conscience, wide as hell,"†

suffered no nausea at the immolation of hosts of innocent victims on the bloody altars of their ambition, their avarice, and their venge

ance.

Many of the instruments used on these occasions, were the basest and most wicked of mankind,-wretchest elaborated, in prisons, in stews, and other hot-beds and nurseries of villany, to the last degree of turpitude of which man is capable. Their stories were so contradictory, that the falsehood and perjury were manifest to the most 'cursory observer: but such was the general depravity and delusion of the times, and such the devouring thirst for the blood of the victims, that no profligacy in the witnesses, no contradiction, no improbability, no impossibility in the evidence, no degree of immaculate innocence in the objects of their rage and malice, could save them from destruction. Accusation and condemnation were, in almost every instance, synonimous terms.

In those days, conspirators were accustomed, if we believe the de positions of some of the plot contrivers, to stand in the open streets and highways, and converse about their conspiracies and treasons, as publicly and unreservedly as at present we convey to each other the intelligence of the price of stocks, the state of the weather, or any of those important nothings which form so large a portion of what

"Leaders so little scrupulous, as to endeavour, by encouraging perjury, subornation, lies, imposture, and even by shedding innocent blood, to gratify their own furious ambition."580

† Shakspeare. + Oates, Dangerfield, and Bedlow. 650 Hume, IV. 331.