The Popish Plot.
Alarmist measures.
According to the first informers Ormonde was to be murdered as well as the King. The Protestants were to be massacred as in 1641, and Ireland taken charge of by a papal nuncio with the assistance of Louis XIV. A little later the extreme Protestants were denouncing the Lord Lieutenant as favourable to the plot. He hardly knew what to make of the news, and even Coventry was puzzled for a time. Orders of the most stringent kind were soon sent from England, and there was nothing to do but to obey them. The English Government were assured not only that Ormonde was to be killed through Peter Talbot’s contrivance, but that the nuncio had been already sent, and also 40,000 black bills to arm the Irish. Ormonde was at Kilkenny when he received Southwell’s letter with a report of the first day’s proceedings at the English Privy Council. ‘I have the honour,’ he said, ‘to be singly named with the King. Who may come in after I know not, but sure His Majesty was to be better attended than by me alone.... I hope I shall rather go alone than in the company they designed me; though it be the best in the world.’ On his return to Dublin he found Archbishop Talbot already in close custody. ‘Peter Walsh,’ he wrote, ‘is able to say something of Peter Talbot’s threats against my life, but I would not have him called to testify anything without his own free consent.’ Officers and soldiers were recalled to quarters, and the oath of supremacy ordered to be strictly enforced. Popish residents for twelve months in garrison towns were not disturbed, but strict rules were made against fresh ones coming in, and in the cases of Drogheda, Cork, Wexford, Limerick, Waterford, Youghal, and Galway, fairs and markets were to be held outside the walls. Roman Catholics were forbidden to keep arms without licence, and their dignitaries as well as all Jesuits and regulars were ordered to leave the kingdom. As usual in former cases, the latter order was very imperfectly obeyed, and three months later a reward was offered for apprehension of the most important ecclesiastics—ten pounds for a bishop or Jesuit, and five pounds for any of the others.[119]
Ormonde accused of favouring the Papists.
William Ryan, superior of the Jesuits, was apprehended, but there was nothing material against him and he was put on board a ship bound for foreign parts. Orders came from England to arrest Lord Mountgarret, but he was bedridden, and that was considered to be imprisonment enough. His son Richard, a foolish young man with a sensible wife, was arrested and so was Colonel Richard Talbot, but the latter was allowed to go abroad as his health suffered from confinement. No evidence of any plot was discovered, but anonymous letters were scattered about the streets of Dublin professing to give information of a conspiracy against Ormonde’s life, and a reward of 200l. was offered by proclamation for a full discovery. In the meantime he was accused in London of treating the Protestants badly, and Anglesey in his character of candid friend carefully related all that he heard. One charge was that the Lord Lieutenant had given twenty-one days to the Papists for the surrender of their arms, thus warning them to hide all weapons, ‘whereas in 1663 the poor English were searched by surprises and their arms taken away and not restored to this day.’ To this the answer was easy, that the Roman Catholics, being fifteen to one, could not be quickly disarmed, and that firearms concealed in damp cellars would soon be very harmless. As to the plot of 1663, it was the work of persons who were Protestants only in so far that they did not call themselves Papists, but who were as ready to upset governments and murder kings as any disciple of Suarez. He was accused of neglecting the safety of Dublin and of keeping the powder carelessly in a dangerous place, but he showed that the garrison was sufficient, that the magazine was where he found it, and that there was no other available building. As to having Papist soldiers in Ireland, they were sent there by the King, who had recalled them from the French service, and he wished them away ‘but not in France lest we should have them here too soon again.’ The last article of accusation mentioned by Anglesey was that Lord Mayor Ward was a dull fool, but to this the Lord Lieutenant had a full answer: ‘He had wit enough to get to be rich and an alderman, and I think by those steps men get to be Lord Mayors. If I could have foreseen the plot I would have interposed for an abler politician.’ Anglesey made great professions of friendship, but neither Ormonde nor Ossory trusted him.[120]
Ormonde and Orrery.
Students of Irish history have to guard themselves against seeing things too exclusively through Ormonde’s eyes. He looms so large, compared with other Irish or Anglo-Irishmen of his day, that there is some danger of being unjust to others. But Burnet was not an admirer of his, yet he stigmatises Anglesey and Orrery, his chief critics, as ‘two men of a very indifferent reputation.’ Anglesey indeed, he says, was very corrupt, ‘stuck at nothing and was ashamed of nothing.’ His letter, mentioned above, was no doubt mainly founded on Orrery’s information. The ex-president, whom Ossory called the ‘Charlatan of Munster,’ was a persistent alarmist who posed as the champion of the Irish Protestants and thought the Lord Lieutenant altogether too favourable to the Roman Catholics. A French invasion was, in his view, a thing to be daily expected, and the preparations to oppose it were quite insufficient. He was still major-general in his own province and wished to be at the head of a great Protestant militia, about the embodiment of which he thought the Lord Lieutenant too inactive. There does not seem to have been any idea of a French descent on Ireland, and after the conclusion of the peace of Nimeguen there could be no real danger. But Orrery continued to complain of inadequate military arrangements, and to lament that the Irish Government were blind to the Irish ramifications of the plot. He was not satisfied with warning statesmen in England, but circulated his complaints among courtiers and private members of Parliament, thus aggravating the general atmosphere of suspicion and panic. Ossory complained to the King, who merely said that he knew Orrery for a rogue and that he would ever continue so. No French soldiers came, and no attack on Protestants was made until Charles II. and Ormonde were both dead and until the latter’s policy had been completely reversed. Ormonde tried to end the controversy with his critic by one full letter, but gave it up in despair, ‘his lordship being impossible to be satisfied and of inexhaustible invention.’ After Orrery’s death in October 1679, his sister, Lady Ranelagh, continued to make mischief in Munster, but she was ‘not so inventive.’[121]
Shaftesbury attacks Ormonde.