During the siege of Limerick by William, and while his army was smarting under the blow inflicted by Sarsfield in the unexpected destruction of its artillery, the besiegers were astonished and amused by the pompous entry of Baldearg into it at the head of his followers; while the hopes of its garrison were raised by his appearance to a strange pitch. Numerous prophecies were recollected or invented. An O'Donell with a red mark was to be the deliverer of his country; and "Baldearg" meant a red mark. An O'Donell was to gain a great battle over the English near Limerick; and at Limerick the O'Donell and the English were brought face to face. And the bloody repulse of the attempt to carry the city by assault which shortly followed seemed to confirm this latter prophecy.

But Baldearg was not duped by the superstitious veneration of which he was the object. During the winter of 1690-1 he saw enough of the exhausted state of the country, the wretched squabbles of the Jacobite leaders, and the unsoldierly qualities of the people, especially of their feeling towards himself and his following to induce him to question, as well the hopefulness of their successful resistance to the military power of England, of which as a soldier he was a not incompetent judge, as the prospect of advantage either to himself or to his people from such success. His notion evidently was that the House of O'Donell was as truly and indefeasibly royal as the House of Stewart; and not a few of his clansmen were of the same mind. He held himself therefore at perfect liberty to act with or against either party as might be most conducive to his own recognition as such. The then Lord-lieutenant of James was actually in possession of the title which might have been his. In the event of success also, he foresaw that the influence of France would absorb every thing that was valuable in Ireland. While therefore there remained any doubt about the issue of the great fight of 1691, that of Aghrim fought on the eleventh of July, Baldearg held aloof with his followers at a short distance. On learning the defeat and death of the French general commanding the forces of James he retreated to the mountains of Mayo, whence he sent an agent to negotiate for his adhesion to the cause of William. A treaty was made; Baldearg with a portion of his devoted adherents, over whom the spell which bound them to him was not altogether broken even by this change, joined General Ginckle and rendered on sev eral occasions, while accompanying a division of the English army, useful service to the cause of William and Mary. It is charged against him that at the commencement of this negotiation he demanded the restoration of the earldom formerly granted to his ancestor; and that failing in this, he accepted an annual pension of five hundred pounds. We see nothing greatly wrong or undignified in this. By leaving the service of Spain without permission he had lost his means of subsistence; and in bringing a considerable accession of strength to one of the contending parties it was his duty to make for himself and for his adherents the best arrangement in his power.

After the conclusion of the civil war in Ireland we find no further mention of his name. The antipathy between his Creaghts and the original or Irish race already referred to, which showed itself in the refusal of the regiments of the former blood to volunteer for France after

the fatal capitulation of Limerick, was, Lord Macaulay supposes, aided by his example and influence. It has been stated that he again returned to Spain; where we find even within the last few years a distinguished general and statesman, the first minister of the Spanish crown, bearing his ancient name.

Perhaps no more singular episode than this sudden appearance and fervent reception, after nearly a century had passed, of the descendant of their exiled chieftain had ever happened in the history of the race of Donell. Its only parallel is the tenacity of the attachment, as recorded in Anderson's "Scottish Nation," of the Scots of Morayshire to the descendants of the ancient line of Macbeth, and the enthusiastic reception given by them once and again to those who were, or were supposed to be, of his blood-even after several generations of the line of Duncan had reigned on the Scottish throne.

The ethnological distinction between the Irish speaking inhabitants of Ulster and those of the other provinces of Ireland here brought out, has scarcely received any notice whatever at the hands of the historians of Ireland. Even Lord Macaulay, who points to the fact of the antipathy between the men of different provinces, as made evident from the curious memorial which the agent of Baldearg O'Donell delivered to Avaux the ambassador of Louis in Ireland, appears to have had no conception that it had its basis in a difference of race. We recommend our readers who doubt of this, to read over the life of Hugh Roe O'Donell the great chief of the Donells. They will find that he made war on the chieftains of Connaught and Munster with as great avidity as on the English themselves, even when these were in hostility to England; and that his allies were the Irish speaking Scotch of Arran and North Argyle. The Irish speaking Creaghts of Ulster at other times are found in the north-west of Scotland fighting under the banners of the opponents of the Scottish kings. But no such alliances between the Southern Irish and the Creaghts of Ulster are to be met with.

*

HENRY LUTTRELL, a colonel in the army on the occasion of the breaking out of the Revolution of 1688, a Roman Catholic, a leading adherent of James, and the second son of a family long settled in the county of Carlow, had, with his elder brother Simon, also a colonel, long served in France, whence he brought back to his native Ireland a sharpened intellect and polished manners, a flattering tongue, some skill in war, and much more skill in intrigue. By direction of Tyrconnel, in his letters accompanying the writs, the members of the house of commons of the parliament of James of 1689 were named to the returning officers for the guidance of the few Roman Catholic electors who alone dared then to vote; and in virtue of this nomination Henry Luttrell was returned as member for his native county of Carlow. With the exception of his brother Simon, Sir Richard Nagle Plowden, and, in name only, the gallant Sarsfield (wno did not serve), he may be considered as almost the only one who sat in that parliament who was qualified to take a lead from his knowledge of affairs; and,

* Vol. i. p. 324.

consequently, for the unjust, unconstitutional, and cruel legislation of that parliament he was, from the influence he exercised thereupon, largely responsible. He was also keenly sensitive when unfavourable criticism was passed upon any of the measures to which he had so greatly contributed.

After the defeat at the Boyne the Luttrells accompanied the army of James in its flight to Limerick, and remained there during its first and fruitless siege by William. On the departure of the lord-lieutenant from Galway to France in September 1690 after the raising of the siege, having delegated, before leaving, his civil authority to one Council and his military authority to another, in neither of which Commissions were the names of the Luttrells to be found, these trained intriguers took no pains to conceal their dissatisfaction. Their mortification rose into bitter indignation when it became known that one Thomas Maxwell, a Scotchman of the noble family of Herries,-a family which had sacrificed and risked once and again life and fortune for loyalty and Romanism, and who was himself a gallant and true man, was included in one of the Commissions from both of which they were shut out. Maxwell's mortal offence, in their eyes, was that he had not concealed the dislike which he felt for the rapparee parliament which had repealed the Act of Settlement, and which had passed the Act of Attainder. On this popular plea, and also the not less popular one that men who were not Irish had been entrusted with a share in the administration, the discontent soon broke out into actual rebellion. The legality of the commissions was called in question. A great meeting was held. A great many officers of the army, some peers, some lawyers, and some Roman Catholic bishops, sent a deputation to the Duke of Berwick, the commander-in-chief of the army, to inform him he had assumed a power to which he had no right, but that nevertheless they would make no change if he would only consent to govern by the advice of a council which should be wholly Irish; and to these terms this young prince, son of the king whom these men pretended to serve, very reluctantly consented to submit and to become a puppet in incompetent hands.

Reflecting afterwards on the possible consequences of their violence, the insurgents deemed it prudent to send a deputation to France for the purpose of vindicating their proceedings. Of this deputation the Roman Catholic bishop of Cork and the two Luttrells were members. In the ship which conveyed them from Limerick to Brest they found a fellow-passenger whose presence was by no means agreeable to them, their enemy Maxwell, whom the Duke of Berwick had sent to watch their motions and to traverse their designs. It is on record by various writers of their party, that Henry coolly proposed to frustrate these instructions by tossing Maxwell into the sea, and but for the bishop and his brother Simon he would have accomplished the murder. The pleadings and counter pleadings before James at Saint Germains by Tyrconnel and Maxwell on the one part, and by the Luttrells on the other, are fully detailed in the various memoirs of the party of this period. The decision of James was characteristic as arrived at after long hesitation and frequent vacillations. He gave all the quarrellers fair words, and sent all the parties back to fight it out in Ireland, while the Duke de Berwick was recalled to France.

The result may be anticipated. Betwixt the new commander, General Saint Ruth, and Tyrconnel, the lord-lieutenant, now returned to Ireland, there arose, through the intrigues of Henry Luttrell, a vehement jealousy. At the siege of Athlone many officers who had signed an instrument to that effect refused obedience to the lord-lieutenant while in the field, and but for the quickness of the English capture would have turned Tyrconnel out of the camp. The death of this functionary a few days afterwards at Limerick nearly led to a second mutiny when it appeared that, in the commission under the great seal of James then opened, among the names of the lords justices appointed in the event of Tyrconnel's death, not only were the names of the Luttrells again not to be found, but that the parties there named for the office, although Irishmen, were of Saxon parentage. A few days before this took place Henry Luttrell himself had been put under arrest. Always fond of dark and crooked policies, he had opened a secret negotiation with the English for the surrender of the town, and one of his letters had been intercepted.

On the capitulation, and on the day when, according to its terms, those who resolved to accompany the faithful to France were required to announce their determination, Henry Luttrell filed off as choosing to remain in Ireland. For his desertion, and perhaps for other services, he received a grant of the forfeited estate of his elder brother Simon, who firmly adhered to the cause of James, and with it a pension of five hundred pounds a-year from the crown; but incurred the undying hate of the Roman Catholic population. Twenty-four years afterwards Henry Luttrell was murdered while going through Dublin in his sedan chair. The commons house of Ireland declared there was cause to suspect he fell a victim to the hatred of the Papists. Eighty years after his death his grave, near Luttrell's town, was violated by a succeeding generation of avengers, and his skull was broken to pieces with a pickaxe. Such is the vindictive spirit of an otherwise noble nation. Such the false code of revenge for supposed desertion when instigated by fanaticism. The assassination of Archbishop Sharp by the Scotch Covenanters has its parallel in the murder of Henry Luttrell. But the deadly hate of which the latter was the object descended to his son and his grandson;* that of which the former was the, perhaps accidental, victim died with himself.

"There is," Junius wrote eighty years after the capitulation of Limerick, " certain family in this country on which nature seems to have entailed a hereditary baseness of disposition. As far as their history has been known, the son has regularly improved on the vices of his father, and has taken care to transmit them pure and undiminished into the bosom of his successors. Elsewhere he says of Luttrell the member for Middlesex, he of the famous Wilkes' contests, the grandson of Henry, "He has degraded even the name of Luttrell.' He exclaims, in allusion to the marriage of the Duke of Cumberland and Mrs. Horton, who was born a Luttrell: "Let parliament look to it. A Luttrell shall never succeed to the crown of England." "It is certain that very few Englishmen," says Lord Macaulay in referring to these observations of the great satirist, "can have sympathised with Junius' abhorrence of the Luttrells, or can even have understood it." "Why then," asks his lordship, "did he use expressions which to the great majority of his readers must have been unintelligible? My answer," replies Lord Macaulay, "is that Philip Francis was born and passed the first ten years of his life within a walk of Luttrell's town."

ECCLESIASTICAL SERIES.

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.

AT the accession of James I., the state of the church in Ireland was one of ruin and dilapidation; neither were its endowments sufficient to give efficacy to an establishment, circumstanced otherwise as it then was, in the midst of barbarism and civil disorder of every kind, and from every cause: nor were its ministers sufficiently qualified to diffuse the light so much wanting, in the surrounding moral and spiritual obscurity of the country. The church of Rome, at the same time, held a station and asserted an influence not much more advanced. But a series of workings and events were from this date about to set in, which was largely to alter and modify the condition of both. The chiefs were ignorant of letters, and indifferent about religion: they only thought of recovering, extending, or securing their dominions, and preserving their iron jurisdiction over the people, on whom they lorded it with absolute control. This power was only to be maintained by preserving the friendly outwork of that perfect ignorance, which, in its various degrees, is the fruitful mother of civil degradation. The church of Rome was, through some of its faithful servants, striving for a still denied and contested influence; but the progress which it had made had been hitherto insufficient to enable it to direct its force, with effect, against the rival church of England. It had yet enough to struggle against, in the jealous opposition of the chiefs who had sagacity to perceive, that it might enlighten and must emancipate from their grasp those whom they so firmly controlled. So lax, accordingly, was the actual resistance to the supremacy asserted by the English church, that the laity of the Romish communion in Dublin were regular in their attendance at the parish church; and this attendance, though enforced by a law, which, under other circumstances, might be justly called tyrannical and harsh, was not the object of complaint. Though the law was severe, there had been no severity in the general spirit of its administration: it had been generally the mind of Queen Elizabeth's government to be strong in the assertion of power, but mild in its application; and the principle was preserved in the case of the Romish church in Ireland.

The English church had its own disadvantages to cope with. Insufficient both in its endowments and organization, its parochial clergy were not sufficiently provided in means or attainments, to bear up against the pressure of irreligion and ignorance, by which they were surrounded. It was not easy at that period to find persons of sufficient spirit, information and ability, to execute so obscure and laborious yet unpromising a task as that of an Irish country pastor, among a community as lawless as the absence of law can make human beings.