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or long after, till the visit of George the Fourth. All that the taste and wealth of the age could devise of magnificent and gorgeous was lavished to swell the solemnity of the scene, and do honour to one who had deserved so much, and from whom so much was yet looked for. Sir Daniel Bellingham, the first lord mayor of Dublin,* exerted himself to give effect and direction to the zeal of every class. The particulars may interest many readers, we therefore add them here in the words of Carte: "When his Grace was advanced within six miles of the place, he was met by a gallant train of young gentlemen, well mounted, and alike richly attired; their habits of a kind of ash-colour, trimmed with scarlet and silver, all in white scarfs, and commanded by one Mr Corker, a deserving gentleman, employed in his majesty's revenue, with other officers to complete the troop, which marched in excellent order to the bounds of the city liberty, where they left his Grace to be received by the sheriffs of the city who were attended by the corporations in their stations; after the sheriffs had entertained his Grace with a short speech, the citizens marched next; and after the maiden troop, next to that his Grace's gentlemen; and then his kettle drums and trumpets; after them the sheriffs of the city, bareheaded, then the sergeants-at-arms and their pursuivants; and in the next place followed his Grace, accompanied by the nobility and privy councillors of the kingdom; after them the lifeguard of horse. Within St James's gate his Grace was entertained by the lord mayor, aldermen, and principal members of the city on the right hand, and on the left stood six gladiators, stript, and drawn; next them his Grace's guard of battle-axes; before them his Majesty's company of the royal regiment; the rest of the companies making a guard to the castle. The king's company marched next; after the citizens; then the battleaxes; and thus through a wonderful throng of people, till they came to the conduit in the corn market, whence wine ran in abundance. At the new hall was erected a scaffold, on which were placed half-adozen anticks; by the tollsel was erected another scaffold, whereupon was represented Ceres under a Canopy, attended by four virgins. At the end of Castle street a third scaffold was erected, on which stood Vulcan by his anvil, with four Cyclops asleep by it. And the last scaffold was raised at the entrance into the castle gate, whereupon stood Bacchus, with four or five good fellows. In fine, the whole ceremony was performed, both upon the point of order and affection, to his Grace's exceeding satisfaction, who was at last welcomed in the castle with great and small shot; and so soon as the streets could be cleared of coaches, (which was a good while first, for they were very many,) the streets and the air were filled with fire-works, which were very well managed to complete the entertainment."

It will not be necessary to go at length into the means which were taken by the duke to carry the bill, against which there was entertained in parliament so much personal reluctance. To impress them with feelings of a more favourable kind, he first employed them for sixteen days in a most apprehensive investigation on the recent insurrection, in which several of their members had been implicated, and many could

'Carte, II. 313.

not avoid feeling the danger' of being involved. The effect was salutary, and they soon began to manifest a tone of mind more submissive and favourable to that sacrifice of personal interests which the peace of the kingdom demanded. And thus by considerable address, and the seasonable interposition of topics, adapted to work on their fears, the bill was passed with little demur, and received the royal assent on December 23, 1665. Five commissioners were appointed to carry it into operation, with a constant appeal to the duke in cases of difficulty. The discharge of this important duty continued for many years to load him with embarrassments and vexations: and the more so as it was his continual duty to interfere for the purpose of preventing the alienation of the lands allotted for the purposes of the act, to influential parties who obtained private grants from the crown. Such grants he steadily set aside, and thus created for himself innumerable private enemies, dangerous from their influence and want of principle.

In 1663, the country gentlemen of England had been distressed by a general fall in the price of cattle, and a consequent difficulty in obtaining their rents. This they attributed to the importation of Irish and Scotch cattle and sheep, which on inquiry was found to be very considerable: the average importation from Ireland alone having been for many years sixty-one thousand head of black cattle. The House of Commons had in consequence ordered a bill to prohibit this importation. This bill passed quickly through the Commons. The measure had been carried with an anxious eagerness through the Commons, and with a view to evade opposition, had in fact been smuggled through as a clause in an "act for the encouragement of trade;" so that the duke of Ormonde only received an intimation upon the subject while it was passing through the upper house, and sent over the earl of Anglesey to protest against it in his name, and that of the Irish council. The act passed, and the destructive consequences were soon felt in Ireland. The council of trade, formed by the duke in Ireland, met to remonstrate upon this grievance: it was composed of numerous gentlemen of fortune, and of the principal merchants; from this body a strong remonstrance was transmitted to England. They represented the disastrous consequences of such a prohibition Irish property, of which it so entirely destroyed the value, that all e farmers would be under the necessity of throwing up their leases. They pointed out the destructive effects which must also be sustained by his majesty's customs, so that the expense of the Irish army and civil list would be necessarily either wanting, to the total ruin of the kingdom, or to be defrayed by large remittances from England. They also shewed the injury which would be inflicted upon London, by a law which would withdraw the whole Irish trade from that city; as the entire stock of wines, clothes, and mostly all manufactured goods, for the use of the Irish nobility and gentry, were purchased there on a half-yearly credit, maintained by the returns of the Irish produce sold in England. They showed the suffering and inconvenience likely to ensue among the trading towns in England, by the rise of the prices of beef and mutton, and the consequent rise of wages. And further pointed out the serious injury to be sustained by the shipping interests on the

western coast, chiefly maintained by the cattle and coal trade between the two countries. Their remonstrance was transmitted by the earl of Ossory and the Irish council, to the duke of Ormonde then in England on the business of the settlement. The duke enforced their arguments with others derived from a more enlarged view of the political state of Europe at the time. Having strongly dwelt upon the unseasonableness of such an act, at a moment when Ireland had recently emerged from ten years of destructive civil war which had almost annihilated all her vital powers, he showed that by some law, or by the operation of some circumstance, every other resource was either cut off or reduced to little more than nominal: with Holland there was war; with France war was impending; the act for the encouragement of trade, shut them out from America; an English monopoly from the Canary Islands. He also repeated with strong additional weight, the forcible and home argument of the great loss which the revenue must sustain. He showed that the English fattening lands, which were mostly stocked from Ireland, must thus become a monopoly to the breeders of cattle. He exposed the arguments on the opposite side, and asserted that the consequences of which they complained were not attributable to the importation of Irish cattle; he observed the manifest absurdity of attributing the loss of £200,000, said to be sustained by English landlords to the importation of cattle to the amount of £140,000 from Ireland. He said that the recent revival of Lent in England must have diminished the consumption; the drought of the last summers must have hurt the farmers, the drain of emigration, the ravage of the plague, the stoppage of trade by the war with Holland. To all these reasons he added, that no such complaints had been heard of till recently, though the Irish cattle trade had been of old standing and had been much more considerable before the civil wars. Finally he brought forward many reasons to show that the injury thus done to Ireland must be eventually hurtful to England.

The king was convinced by these arguments, with many others which we have not noticed here: but he was himself dependent upon his commons, and had not the virtue or the firmness to oppose their narrow and selfish policy. The bill met with considerable opposition in the lords, where views of general policy were better understood, and considerations of national justice had more weight. There the earl of Castlehaven made a vigorous stand, and represented the great benefit which the commerce of Ireland had received under the sagacious and energetic care of the duke of Ormonde, "greater (he justly observed,) than it had experienced even from the earl of Strafford." His exposition converted many; but nothing better than delay was obtained. For the following three years the act continued to be the subject of the most violent party opposition and court manœuvre, and after being strenuously combated by the duke and his friends at every stage, and on every discussion, and feebly discountenanced by the king, it was at last when the house of lords showed the strongest inclination to throw it out, carried through by the influence of the court and the interest of the duke of York. The effects were such as had been predicted by the duke of Ormonde and the friends of Ireland, but eventu

ally turned out to the advantage of Ireland by turning the wealth and industry of the country into other channels, as we shall have to show further on.

During these proceedings, many troubles had occurred in Ireland, to engage the anxious attention of the duke. A party of forty plunderers, under the leaders Costello and Nangle, gave much trouble during the summer of 1666, but were in the end routed, and Nangle killed; after which Costello fled into Connaught, where, at the head of half-a-dozen desperadoes, he committed frightful havoc and plunder among the farm-houses, and villages. At last lord Dillon, on whose estate he had committed the greatest depredations, sent out some armed parties of his own tenantry. Costello attacked one of these in the night, which he thought to surprise: he was however shot dead, and the whole of his gang cut to pieces. Thus ended an affair which but a few years before would have been a wide wasting insurrection. It clearly indicates the sense of the people, at this time pretty well experienced as to the real fruits of civil war.

Far more serious was a mutiny among the troops, of whom a large part were ill-disposed to the government, and all discontented at the irregularity of their pay, and the insufficiency of their maintenance. The duke received intelligence of a conspiracy, headed by colonel Phaire, captain Walcot, and other officers, to raise a general insurrection; and having sent full information to lord Orrery, who commanded in Munster, lord Orrery soon found means to seize a person from whom he learned that the conspiracy extended to England and Scotland, and that it was planned " to rise at once in all the three kingdoms; to set up the long parliament, of which above forty members were engaged; that measures had been taken to gather together the disbanded soldiers of the old army, and Ludlow was to be general-in-chief; that they were to be assisted with forces, arms, and money, by the Dutch; and were to rise all in one night, and spare none that would not join in the design-which was to pull down the king with the house of lords, and instead of the bishops to set up a sober and painful ministry; that collections had been made of money to work upon the necessities of the soldiery, and they had already bought several men in different garrisons, and that particularly they had given large sums to soldiers (some of which he named,) that were upon the guard in the castles of Dublin and Limerick, for the seizing of those places, whenever they were ready to declare, which would be in a few weeks; that each officer engaged in the design had his particular province assigned him, and answered for a particular number of men, which he was to bring into the field."

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The earl of Orrery, with the promptness which was natural to his active and energetic character, took the most effectual means to suppress so dangerous a spirit within his own jurisdiction. He communicated with all the officers, and established a strict system of vigilant observation over the actions and conversation of the soldiers. proposed also to empower the officers to arrest all suspicious persons, and to seize their arms and horses; but to this the duke objected. "I confess," he writes to lord Orrery, "I am not willing to trust inferior officers, civil or military, with judging who are danger

ous persons, and fit to be secured, and their horses taken from them; a thing seldom performed without a mixture of private ends, either of revenge or avarice; and I know not what could more induce or extenuate the crime of rebellion than the taking up of persons or their goods upon alarms or general suggestions."

The duke was fully aware at that moment that the mutinous spirit which had thus showed itself in the south, and still more the indications of a similar temper in the north, were but the premonitory signs of a more dangerous and general disorder. There was fermenting in Scotland an insurrectionary temper which had its branches in England and Ireland; and the duke considered these outbreaks among the northern garrisons the more to be dreaded on account of their vicinity to the Scottish coast. A mutiny in Carrickfergus, in April, was easily appeased without the necessity of any severe or coercive remedy; and the garrison, encouraged by the dangerous lenity which had been shown, again broke out more fiercely in May, when they seized upon the town and castle of Carrickfergus. The earl of Donegal endeavoured to treat with them, but they rejected his offers, the mildness of which only served to encourage their insubordination. The duke, on receiving intelligence of the circumstances, sent orders to the earl to make no further offers, as it was become essential to the peace of the kingdom that the mutineers should be made examples of to the disaffected throughout the army. He immediately sent off his son, the earl of Arran, with four companies of his guards, the only troops on whom he felt any reliance; and not content with this, he soon after set off himself for the north.

The earl of Arran had encountered rough weather, which drove him within a league of the Mull of Galloway; but the storm abating, he was enabled to get into the bay of Carrickfergus on the 27th, and at noon landed his men without opposition. He was joined by the earl of Donegal, and by the mayor who had made his escape. From the mayor he received the assurance that the townsmen were on the watch to favour him, and if he could beat the mutineers from the walls, a party would seize upon a gate and secure his admission. The mutineers formed their own plan, which was to plunder the town and shut themselves in the castle: to secure time for this they sent to demand time till four o'clock, to consider what they should propose. Lord Arran was however apprized of their design and demanded immediate entrance, and on being refused, he ordered a smart fire upon the walls. The garrison, seeing that no time was to be lost, instantly commenced their retreat into the castle, leaving what they considered a sufficient party to defend the walls. The earl of Arran soon forced his way, with the loss of two men slain at his side, while the leader of the mutineers, one Dillon, was slain in the pursuit as they fled towards the castle. There were 120 men in the castle, strongly fortified, and having provisions for a month: but wholly without officers. They became terrified at the regular preparations for an assault, and quickly offered to treat, but lord Arran sent them word that he could not offer them any terms, and they presently submitted at discretion.

⚫ Carte, II. 325.

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