Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry. Thomas Osborne Davis

his relatives and his favourites, deserted him in the hour of his need. It seems not excessive to say that there never was a revolution in which so much ingratitude, selfishness, and meanness were displayed. There is not one great genius or untainted character eminent in it. Yet it succeeded. On the 18th of December, William entered London; on the 23rd, James sailed for France; and in the February following the English convention declared he had abdicated.

      These dates are, as Plowden remarks, important; for though James's flight, on the 23rd of December, was the legal pretence for insurrection in the summer of 1689, yet negotiations had been going on with Holland through 1687 and 1688,[15] and the Northern Irish formed themselves into military corps, and attacked the soldiers of the crown before Enniskillen, on the first week in December; and on the 7th December the gates of Derry were shut in the face of the king's troops,[16] facts which should be remembered in judging the loyalty of the two parties.

      CHAPTER II.

      ORIGIN AND CHARACTER OF THE PARLIAMENT.—THE HOUSE OF LORDS.

      James landed at Kinsale, 12th March, 1689, about a month after the election of William and Mary by the English convention. He entered Dublin in state on the 24th March, accompanied by D'Avaux, as Ambassador from France, and a splendid court. His first act was to issue five proclamations—the first, requiring the return and aid of his Irish absentee subjects; the second, urging upon the local authorities the suppression of robberies and violence which had increased in this unsettled state of affairs; the third, encouraging the bringing provisions for his army; the fourth, creating a currency of such metal as he had, conceiving it preferable to a paper currency (a gold or silver currency was out of his power, for of the two millions promised him by France, he only got £150,000); the fifth proclamation summoned a parliament for the 7th May, 1689.

      James also issued a proclamation promising liberty of conscience, justice and protection[17] to all; and, after receiving many congratulatory addresses, set out for Derry to press the blockade. On the 29th April he returned to Dublin. On the 7th May Ireland possessed a complete and independent government. Leaving the castle, over which floated the national flag, James proceeded in full procession to the King's Inns, where the Parliament sat, and the Commons having assembled at the bar of the Peers, James entered, "with Robe and Crown," and addressed the Commons in a speech full of manliness and dignity. At the close of the speech, the Chancellor of Ireland, Lord Gosworth, directed the Commons to retire and make choice of a Speaker. In half an hour the Commons returned and presented Sir Richard Nagle as their Speaker, a man of great endowments and high character. The Speaker was accepted, and the Houses adjourned.

      The peers who sat in this parliament amounted to fifty-four. Among these fifty-four were six dignitaries of the Protestant Church, one duke, ten earls, sixteen viscounts, and twenty-one barons. It contained the oldest families of the country—O'Brien and DeCourcy, MacCarty and Bermingham, De Burgo and Maguire, Butler and Fitzpatrick. The bishops of Meath, Cork, Ossory, Limerick, and Waterford, and the Protestant names of Aungier, Le Poer, and Forbes sat with the representatives of the great Roman Catholic houses of Plunket, Barnewell, Dillon, and Nugent. Nor were some fresher honours wanting; Talbot and Mountcashel were the darlings of the people, the trust of the soldiery, the themes of bards.

      King's impeachment of this parliament is amusing enough. His first charge is, that if the House were full, the majority would have been Protestant. Now, if the majority preferred acting as insurgents under the Prince of Orange, to attending to their duties in the Irish house of peers, it was their own fault. Certain it is, the most violent might safely have attended, for the earls of Granard and Longford and the bishop of Meath not only attended, but carried on a bold and systematic opposition. And so far was the House from resenting this, that they committed the sheriff of Dublin to prison for billeting an officer at the bishop of Meath's. Yet the bishop had not merely resisted their favourite repeal of the Settlement, but, in doing so, had stigmatized their fathers and some of themselves as murderous rebels.

      King's next charge is, that the attainders of many peers were reversed to admit them. Now this is unsupported evidence against fact, and simply a falsehood. Then he complains of the new creations. They were just five in number; and of these five, two were great legal dignitaries—the Lord Chancellor and Lord Chief Justice of Ireland; the third was Colonel MacCarty, of the princely family of Desmond, and a distinguished soldier with a great following; the others, Brown, Lord Kenmare; and Bourke, Lord Bofin (son of Lord Clanricarde), men of high position in their counties.

      Fitton, Lord Gosworth, occupied the woolsack. That he was a man of capacity, if not of character, may be fairly presumed from his party having put him in so important an office in such trying times.[18] He certainly had neither faction nor following to bring with him. Nor was he treated by his party below what his rank entitled him to. The appointments in his court were not interfered with: his decrees were not impeached, and in the council he sat above even Herbert, the Lord Chancellor of England. Yet, King describes this man as "detected of forgery," one who was brought from gaol to the woolsack—one who had not appeared in any court—a stranger to the kingdom, the laws, and the practice and rules of court;—one who made constant needless references to the Masters to disguise his ignorance, and who was brought into power, first, because he was "a convert papist, that is, a renegade to his country and his religion;" and, secondly, because he would enable the Irish to recover their estates by countenancing "forgeries and perjuries," which last, continues the veracious archbishop, he nearly effected, without putting them to the trouble of repealing the Acts of Settlement. King staggers from the assertion that Fitton denied justice to Protestants, into saying it was got from him with difficulty.

      Thomas Nugent, Baron Riverstown, second son of the Earl of Westmeath, was chosen chairman of committees. King, who is the only authority at present accessible to us, states that Nugent had been "out" in 1641, but considering that he did not die till 1715, he must have been a mere boy in '41, if born at all; and, at any rate, as his family, including his grandfather, Lord Delvin (first Earl of Westmeath), and his father, carried arms against the Irish up to 1648, and suffered severely, it is most improbable that he was, as a child, in the opposite ranks.

      The Irish had never ceased to agitate against the Acts of Settlement and Explanation. Thus Sir Nicholas Plunket had done legal battle against the first, till an express resolution excluded him by name from appearing at the bar of the council. Then Colonel Talbot (Tyrconnell) led the opposition effort for their repeal or mild administration. In 1686, Sir Richard Nagle went to England, as agent of the Irish, to seek their repeal. But the greatest effort was made in 1688. Nugent and Rice were sent expressly to London to press the repeal. Rice is said to have shown great tact and eloquence, but Nugent to have been rash and confused. Certain it is, they were unsuccessful with the council, and were brutally insulted by the London mob, set on by the very decent chiefs of the Williamite party.

      Of the eighteen prelates, ten were Englishmen, one Welsh, and only seven Irish. Several had been chaplains to the different lords lieutenant. Eleven out of the eighteen were in England during the session. Of these, some were habitual absentees, such as Thomas Hackett, bishop of Down, deprived in 1691 by Williamite commissioners for an absence of twenty years. Others had got leave of absence during '87 and '88. Some, like Archbishop John Vesey of Tuam, and Bishop Richard Tennison of Killala, fled in good earnest, and accepted lecturerships and cures in London.

      There was one man among them who deserves more notice, Anthony Dopping, lord bishop of Meath. He was born in Dublin, 28th March, 1643, and died 24th April, 1697. He was educated in St. Patrick's schools, and won his fellowship in T.C.D. in 1662, being only 19 years old. He led the opposition in the parliament of '89 with great vigour and pertinacity. He resisted all the principal measures, and procured great changes in some of them, as appears by "The Journal." He had a fearless character and ready tongue. He continued a leader of the Ultras after the battle of the Boyne, and quarrelled with the government. King William, finding how slowly the Irish war proceeded, had prepared and sent to Ireland a proclamation conceding the demands of the Roman Catholics, granting them perfect religious liberty, right of admission to all offices, and an establishment for their clergy.[19] While this was with the printers in Dublin, news came of the danger of Limerick. The proclamation was suppressed by the Lords Justices, who hastened to the camp, "to hold the Irish to as hard terms as possible. This