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defending his rights. He had sat inside the circle of Cromwell's scourge, and harbored the breathless and the hunted. They had been warm and kind people, these optimistic Irish. The Normans had mingled with them, come to understand and unite with them. But now this debased man with a few debased coins had to go among the jackals of the law in London. People would shirk him, and his melancholy history. He would not know the right lawyer, or the right minister, or the right minister's mistress. His Gaelic would amuse Mr. Smithkins. He would stoop to bribe the wrong people. He would, like Pitt, get drunk. And he would brag and boast, and perhaps brawl, like Captain Costigan. A dingy history, a damp ruin of a history, ending with a person called Petty who now owns the very beautiful land of Kenmare.

13

Well, there is one more shake of the dice, even after Oliver Plunkett has been tried, tortured, and executed for a non-existent Popish Plot, in 1681.

That shake of the dice is on an exposed card, which is James II, against a concealed card, William. James is a Catholic king at last. He makes Tyrconnel head of his Irish Government, who favors the Catholics.

James is safe enough on the throne of England till he breeds an heir. Then the English, not relishing a renewal of political seasickness, send for the solid Dutchman, William III.

A parliament is held in Dublin in 1689. It affirms tolerance to the Protestants but takes back the land. This is inflammatory. But the Catholic Irish are now pawns in a great European game. The French fleet under Tourville brilliantly defeats the combined Dutch and English at Beachy Head. James comes to Ireland. With a French army and Ormonde's Irish and the most militaristic of French advisers (who want to massacre all the Protestants, to start with), he meets William and his Dutch and his Danish and his Scottish at the battle of the Boyne.

On July 1, 1691, "the battle of the Boyne was won, not in the legendary manner, by William, with his sword in his left hand, or Schomberg, plunging into the river to meet a soldier's death, but by the younger Schomberg, who crossed higher and outflanked the French. Tourville's victory, after that, was entirely useless. William offered an amnesty, which was frustrated by the English hunger for Irish estates." So, Lord Acton.

In the previous fighting at Londonderry, against the

Jacobite army, the 'prentice boys and Protestant settlers had stood siege magnificently. Now Limerick was to repulse William, with Patrick Sarsfield as the bril

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liant Irish figure. Sarsfield's courage and daring enliven the somber picture. But the battle of Aughrim, where the French general St. Ruth was killed at a crucial moment, turned the tide against absolutism, James, Louis XIV-and the Irish.

14

This ended the Stuarts. Beneath the drums that beat Sarsfield's honorable exit from Limerick one listened in vain for the breathing of the Irish nation. Englishmen had not only conquered Ireland but had removed from it everything that seemed worth having. Was anything left? A flicker of culture, and the Catholic religion-these were allowed to remain, by the treaty of Limerick.

So the history of the seventeenth century limps to a close. It began in a lurid, bloody dawn. A gray morning followed, which was almost steady. But clouds gathered storm for the fierce noonday outbursts of 1641. For eleven years thereafter the skies were torn, the earth deluged, the country convulsed and desolated. After Cromwell, whose bloodshot eye saw the Irish as papist monsters, the afternoon was livid. With the restoration of the Stuarts, there came a quiver of watery sunlight, a thin flush of rose-for a few years of attempted and apprehensive reconstruction. Then James II brought Ireland his lost cause, and drew on her the ugly, brutal wrenching tornado of the Williamite wars. Night at last descends. It is

a night of such blackness, cold, and horror that it reminds one only of a no-man's-land in which two bands of crouching men are at work in the blackness; one to kill the wounded, the other to rob the dead.

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