CHAPTER XI.
----------O, behold How pomp is followed! mine will now be your's; And should we shift estates, your's would be mine! Antony and Cleopatra.
We now bring back the reader to the realm of Ireland, which was doomed shortly to be the scene of anarchy and civil war, where disastrous tidings of awful import, posting incessantly onward, hourly arrived, rapidly heralded by rumour's thousand tongues, to afflict the loyal and disconcert the brave.
An official despatch soon followed, which communicated and confirmed to Tyrconnel the sad and dismal event of the flight of his royal master to France, which truly gave him deep and sincere affliction. This voluntary abdication of his throne upon the part of King James II. gave Tyrconnel sorrowful concern for the present, and a sad and mournful foreboding of the future! "Oh, had my royal master only stood his ground," said the duke, "and have firmly held his throne, who would, who could have dared to hurl him from it? No; even with all his political miscalculations, nevertheless his enemies could not have succeeded. The Prince of Orange would still have found it a difficult, perhaps an impossible task, to have ousted his truly royal, accomplished, and brave father-in-law, from his lawful throne; for brave and valiant was the king, and I doubt not but still brave he is. And there was a time, be it not forgotten, while he was Duke of York and Lord High Admiral of England, when nobly he fought beneath the British banner, and gloriously led on his fleet to victory!"
The Duchess of Tyrconnel, whose powerful mind and firm nerves were "albeit unused to the melting mood," yet when her Grace heard the mournful recital of the sufferings and voluntary exile of her afflicted queen; she then indeed was deeply affected, and
"Dropt tears as fast as the Arabian trees Their medicinal gum."
The Duchess was a wife—moreover a mother, and she knew how to pity and compassionate the unfortunate, from the palace of kings down to the cottage of the poor. And equally distressed was our lovely heroine, whose generous bosom ever beat, and felt, and assisted the afflicted.
Some months had now elapsed, when one morning, while the duke was at breakfast with his family, a despatch for his Grace, and in the hand-writing of King James, arrived. The despatch intimated that His Majesty was then on his way to Ireland, and summoning the immediate attendance of Tyrconnel at Kinsale, where the king proposed to land. The despatch was brought over in a fast-sailing French corvette, called "l'Eclair," which had been detached from the French fleet which was to escort King James to Kinsale, expressly upon this mission. And his Grace, in obedience to the royal mandate, instantly set off by land for the town of Kinsale.
King James II., upon abdicating, or deserting (for great debates in the British parliament ensued upon the proper term to be used) the throne of England, had sought and obtained an asylum in France, generously yielded to him by Louis XIV. King James now fully resolved, as His Majesty expressed himself, "to make one more glorious attempt to recover his throne;" which to effectuate he sailed from the shores of France, attended by fourteen ships of war, six frigates, and three fire-ships, which had been prepared in the port of Brest by the French king. At the same time seven French battalions embarked in the fleet which conveyed King James. The troops were commanded by the Count de Lauzun, the same gallant, generous nobleman who had escorted King James's queen and the Prince of Wales to the court of Versailles. The forces were accompanied with twelve field pieces.