Denounced by two traitors, the whole enterprise fell to pieces, and the four projectors failed to save themselves.
Abandoned nearly by all on whom he had relied, the unfortunate Lacy was arrested, with a few faithful friends, and conveyed, under care of a strong guard of soldiers, to a prison at Barcelona, where he was hastily tried by a subservient military commission, and sentenced to death—a doom which he heard with a calmness that staggered even the stern and partial judge who pronounced it.
As a rising of the Catalonians in his favour was feared and expected, the officials of the arbitrary Government at Barcelona secretly embarked him on board of a small vessel, at midnight, on the 20th June; and, resolving not to be cheated of their victim, sailed for the island of Majorca; and there he was quite as secretly landed on a solitary part of the coast, and conducted, on the night of the 4th July, to the Castle of Belver, which was garrisoned by a regiment of Neapolitan soldiers.
At four o'clock next morning he was suddenly brought out of the fortress, just as day was breaking, and conducted to the deep fosse before the gates; there he was barbarously shot by a platoon of Italians, pursuant to the orders of those who had conveyed him from Barcelona.
Louis Lacy had already faced death too often to receive it otherwise than with the hereditary courage and coolness which had distinguished him through his eventful life, and he fell with his face to his destroyers.
His body was deposited in the old cathedral church of San Dominic, at Palma, the capital of the island; but there it was exhumed, in 1820, and conveyed, with much religious pomp and solemnity, to Barcelona, and interred near the remains of his uncle, the Captain-General Count Francis Anthony; while the newly-established Cortes, vainly to honour the memory of one who had died for them, named his son the first grenadier of the Spanish army.
Thus perished Louis Lacy, in his forty-second year, one who, more even than Riego, had secured, by his patriotism, the Revolution of 1820.
"Lacy," says a French writer, "etait doué d'une forte constitution, et d'une âme ardent, energique et généreuse. Habile général, intrepide dans les dangers, il s'était distingué par des faits d'armes, et par un patriotisme dignes des Grecs et des Romains!"
FOOTNOTES:
[11] This is not the same Irish officer of whom a memoir is given elsewhere.