The English minister now appears to have tried the old game of driving the people into a rebellion, which could be crushed at once by the sword, and would spare the necessity of making concessions; or of entangling the leaders in some act of overt treason, and quashing the movement by depriving it of its heads. An opportunity for the latter manoeuvre now presented itself. A Protestant clergyman, who had resided many years in France, came to the country for the purpose of opening communications between the French Government and the United Irishmen. This gentleman, the Rev. William Jackson, confided his secret to his solicitor, a man named Cockayne. The solicitor informed Mr. Pitt, and by his desire continued to watch his victim, and trade on his open-hearted candour, until he had led him to his doom. The end of the unfortunate clergyman was very miserable. He took poison when brought up for judgment, and died in the dock. His object in committing this crime was to save his property for his wife and children, as it would have been confiscated had his sentence been pronounced.
The Viceroyalty of Earl FitzWilliam once more gave the Irish nation some hope that England would grant them justice. But he was soon recalled; Lord Camden was sent in his stead; and the country was given up to the Beresford faction, who were quite willing to co-operate in Mr. Pitt's plan of setting Protestants and Catholics against each other, of exciting open rebellion, and of profiting by the miseries of the nation to forge new chains for it, by its parliamentary union with England. Everything was done now that could be done to excite the Catholics to rebellion. The Orangemen, if their own statement on oath[[573]] is to be trusted, were actually bribed to persecute the Catholics; sermons[[574]] were preached by Protestant ministers to excite their feelings; and when the Catholics resisted, or offered reprisals, they were punished with the utmost severity, while their persecutors always escaped. Lord Carhampton, grandson of the worthless Henry Luttrell, who had betrayed the Irish at the siege of Limerick, commanded the army, and his cruelty is beyond description. An Insurrection Act was passed in 1796; magistrates were allowed to proclaim counties; suspected persons were to be banished the country or pressed into the fleet, without the shadow of trial; and Acts of Indemnity[[575]] were passed, to shield the magistrates and the military from the consequences of any unlawful cruelties which fanaticism or barbarity might induce them to commit.
Grattan appealed boldly and loudly against these atrocities. "These insurgents," he said, "call themselves Protestant Boys—that is, a banditti of murderers, committing massacre in the name of God, and exercising despotic power in the name of liberty." The published declaration of Lord Gosford and of thirty magistrates, who attempted to obtain some justice for the unfortunate subjects of these wrongs, is scarcely less emphatic. It is dated December 28, 1795: "It is no secret that a persecution, accompanied with all the circumstances of ferocious cruelty which have in all ages distinguished this calamity, is now raging in this country; neither age, nor sex, nor even acknowledged innocence, is sufficient to excite mercy or afford protection. The only crime which the unfortunate objects of this persecution are charged with, is a crime of easy proof indeed; it is simply a profession of the Roman Catholic faith. A lawless banditti have constituted themselves judges of this species of delinquency, and the sentence they pronounce is equally concise and terrible; it is nothing less than a confiscation of all property and immediate banishment—a prescription that has been carried into effect, and exceeds, in the number of those it consigns to ruin and misery, every example that ancient or modern history can supply. These horrors are now acting with impunity. The spirit of justice has disappeared from the country; and the supineness of the magistracy of Armagh has become a common topic of conversation in every corner of the kingdom."
One should have supposed that an official declaration from such an authority, signed by the Governor of Armagh and thirty magistrates, would have produced some effect on the Government of the day; but the sequel proved that such honorable exposure was as ineffective as the rejected petition of millions of Catholics. The formation of the yeomanry corps filled up the cup of bitterness. The United Irishmen, seeing no hope of constitutional redress, formed themselves into a military organization. But, though the utmost precautions were used to conceal the names of members and the plans of the association, their movements were well known to Government from an early period. Tone, in the meantime, came to France from America, and induced Carnot to send an expedition to Ireland, under the command of General Hoche. It ended disastrously. A few vessels cruised for a week in the harbour of Bantry Bay; but, as the remainder of the fleet, which was separated by a fog, did not arrive, Grouchy, the second in command, returned to France.
Meanwhile, the Society of United Irishmen spread rapidly, and especially in those places where the Orangemen exercised their cruelties. Lord Edward FitzGerald now joined the movement; and even those who cannot commend the cause, are obliged to admire the perfection of his devoted self-sacrifice to what he believed to be the interests of his country. His leadership seemed all that was needed to secure success. His gay and frank manner made him popular; his military bearing demanded respect; his superior attainments gave him power to command; his generous disinterestedness was patent to all. But already a paid system of espionage had been established by Government. A set of miscreants were found who could lure their victims to their doom—who could eat and drink, and talk and live with them as their bosom friends, and then sign their death-warrant with the kiss of Judas. There was a regular gang of informers of a low class, like the infamous Jemmy O'Brien, who were under the control of the Town-Majors, Sirr and Swan. But there were gentlemen informers also, who, in many cases, were never so much as suspected by their dupes. MacNally, the advocate of the United Irishmen, and Mr. Graham, their solicitor, were both of that class. Thomas Reynolds, of Killeen Castle, entered their body on purpose to betray them. Captain Armstrong did the same. John Hughes, a Belfast bookseller, had himself arrested several times, to allay their suspicions. John Edward Nevill was equally base and treacherous. However necessary it may be for the ends of government to employ spies and informers, there is no necessity for men to commit crimes of the basest treachery. Such men and such crimes will ever be handed down to posterity with the reprobation they deserve.
Attempts were now made to get assistance from France. Mr. O'Connor and Lord Edward FitzGerald proceeded thither for that purpose; but their mission was not productive of any great result. The people were goaded to madness by the cruelties which were committed on them every day; and it was in vain that persons above all suspicion of countenancing either rebels or Papists, protested against these enormities in the name of common humanity. In 1797 a part of Ulster was proclaimed by General Lalor, and Lord Moira described thus, in the English House of Lords, the sufferings of the unhappy people: "When a man was taken up on suspicion, he was put to the torture; nay, if he were merely accused of concealing the guilt of another, the punishment of picketing, which had for some years been abolished as too inhuman even in the dragoon service, was practised. I have known a man, in order to extort confession of a supposed crime, or of that of some of his neighbours, picketed until he actually fainted; picketed a second time, until he fainted again; picketed a third time, until he once more fainted; and all upon mere suspicion. Nor was this the only species of torture; many had been taken and hung up until they were half dead, and then threatened with a repetition of this cruel treatment unless they made confession of the imputed guilt. These," continued his Lordship, "were not particular acts of cruelty, exercised by men abusing the power committed to them, but they formed part of a system. They were notorious; and no person could say who would be the next victim of this oppression and cruelty." As redress was hopeless, and Parliament equally indifferent to cruelties and to remonstrances, Mr. Grattan and his colleagues left the Irish House to its inhumanity and its fate.
In the autumn of this year, 1797, Mr. Orr, of Antrim, was tried and executed, on a charge of administering the oath of the United Irishmen to a soldier. This gentleman was a person of high character and respectability. He solemnly protested his innocence; the soldier, stung with remorse, swore before a magistrate that the testimony he gave at the trial was false. Petitions were at once sent in, praying for the release of the prisoner, but in vain; he was executed on the 14th of October, though no one doubted his innocence; and "Orr's fate" became a watchword of and an incitement to rebellion. Several of the jury made a solemn oath after the trial that, when locked up for the night to "consider" their verdict, they were supplied abundantly with intoxicating drinks, and informed one and all, that, if they did not give the required verdict of guilty, they should themselves be prosecuted as United Irishmen. Mr. Orr was offered his life and liberty again and again if he would admit his guilt; his wife and four young children added their tears and entreaties to the persuasions of his friends; but he preferred truth and honour to life and freedom. His end was worthy of his resolution. On the scaffold he turned to his faithful attendant, and asked him to remove his watch, as he should need it no more. Mr. Orr was a sincere Protestant; his servant was a Catholic. His last words are happily still on record. He showed the world how a Protestant patriot could die; and that the more sincere and deep his piety, the less likely he would be to indulge in fanatical hatred of those who differed from him. "You, my friend," he said to his weeping and devoted servant—"you, my friend, and I must now part. Our stations here on earth have been a little different, and our mode of worshipping the Almighty Being that we both adore. Before His presence we shall stand equal. Farewell! Remember Orr!"[[576]]
Alas! there was more to remember than the fate of this noble victim to legal injustice. I have before alluded to that strange phenomenon of human nature, by which men, who, at least, appear to be educated and refined, can, under certain circumstances, become bloodthirsty and cruel. The demon enters into the man, and make him tenfold more demoniacal than himself. But fearful as the deeds of officers and men have been in India, where the unhappy natives were shattered to atoms from the cannons' mouths: or, in more recent times, when men, and even women, have all but expired under the lash; no deeds of savage vengeance have ever exceeded those which were perpetrated daily and hourly in Ireland, before the rebellion of 1798. For the sake of our common humanity I would that they could be passed over unrecorded; for the sake of our common humanity I shall record them in detail, for it may be that the terror of what men can become when they give way to unrestrained passions, may deter some of my fellow-creatures from allowing themselves to participate in or to enact such deeds of blood. Historical justice, too, demands that they should be related. Englishmen have heard much of the cruelties of Irish rebels at Wexford, which I shall neither palliate nor excuse. Englishmen have heard but little of the inhuman atrocities which excited that insurrection, and prompted these reprisals. And let it be remembered, that there are men still living who saw these cruelties enacted in their childhood, and men whose fathers and nearest relations were themselves subjected to these tortures. To the Celt, so warm of heart and so tenacious of memory, what food this is for the tempter, who bids him recall, and bids him revenge, even now, these wrongs! What wonder if passion should take the place of reason, and if religion, which commands him to suffer patiently the memory of injuries inflicted on others, often harder to bear than one's own pain, should sometimes fail to assert its sway![[577]]
I shall give the account of these atrocities in the words of a Protestant historian first. The Rev. Mr. Gordon writes thus, in his narrative of these fearful times: "The fears of the people became so great at length, that they forsook their houses in the night, and slept (if, under such circumstances, they could sleep) in the ditches and the women were even delivered in that exposed condition, These facts were notorious at the time.... Some abandoned their house from fear of being whipped; and this infliction many persons appeared to fear more than death itself. Many unfortunate men were strung up as it were to be hanged, but were let down now and then, to try if strangulation would oblige them to become informers." He then goes on to relate at length how the magistrates tortured smiths and carpenters at once, because it was supposed from their trade they must have made pikes; and how they, at last, professed to know a United Irishman by his face, and "never suffered any person whom they deigned to honour with this distinction, to pass off without convincing proof of their attention." He also mentions the case of a hermit named Driscoll, whose name and the same details of his sufferings are given in Clancy's account of the insurrection. This man was strangled three times, and flogged four times, because a Catholic prayer-book was found in his possession, on which it was supposed that he used to administer oaths of disloyalty.
I shall now give the account of another historian. Plowden writes thus; "These military savages [the yeomanry corps—it will be remembered what Lord Moira said of them in Parliament] were permitted, both by magistrates and officers, in open day, to seize every man they wished or chose to suspect as a Croppy, and drag him to the guardhouse, where they constantly kept a supply of coarse linen caps, besmeared inside with pitch; and when the pitch was well heated, they forced the cap on his head; and sometimes the melted pitch, running into the eyes of the unfortunate victim, superadded blindness to his other tortures. They generally detained him till the pitch had so cooled, that the cap could not be detached from the head without carrying with it the hair and blistered skin; they then turned him adrift, disfigured, often blind, and writhing with pain. They enjoyed with loud bursts of laughter the fiendlike sport—the agonies of their victim. At other times, they rubbed moistened gunpowder into the hair, in the form of a cross, and set fire to it; and not unfrequently sheared off the ears and nose of the unfortunate Croppy." Plowden then details the atrocities of a sergeant of the Cork Militia, who was called Tom the Devil. He concludes: "It would be uncandid to detail only instances of the brutality of the lower orders, whilst evidence is forthcoming of persons of fortune and education being still more brutalized by its deleterious spirit." He then mentions an instance, on the authority of both an eyewitness and the victim, in which Lord Kingsborough, Mr. Beresford, and an officer whose name he did not know, tortured two respectable Dublin tradesmen, one named John Fleming, a ferryman, the other Francis Gough, a coachmaker. The nobleman superintended the flagellation of Gough, and at every stroke insulted him with taunts and inquiries how he liked it. The unfortunate man was confined to his bed in consequence, for six months after the infliction. On Whit-Sunday, 1798, these men were again tortured with pitchcaps by the gentlemen. Other instances might be added, but these will suffice to show the feeling which actuated the rulers who permitted, and the men who perpetrated, these deeds of blood. "With difficulty," says Mr. Plowden, "does the mind yield reluctant consent to such debasement of the human species. The spirit which degrades it to that abandonment is of no ordinary depravity. The same spirit of Orangeism moved the colonel in Dublin, and his sergeant at Wexford. The effect of that spirit can only be faintly illustrated by facts. Those have been verified to the author by the spectator and the sufferer."[[578]]