Your experts have arrived safe [wrote the Secretary, reporting their appearance]. At this moment we are about to make trial of O'Leary's sermons,[538] and Parker's rhapsodies. They may be both in their different callings of very great use. The former, if we can depend on him, has it in his power to discover to us the real designs of the Catholics, from which quarter, after all, the real mischief is to spring. The other can scrape an acquaintance with the great leaders of sedition, particularly Napper Tandy, and perhaps by that means dive to the bottom of his secrets.[539]
Sir Richard Musgrave was one of the alarmists who loved to purvey sensational news for Dublin Castle. His 'History of the Rebellion,' published in 1801, embodies his impressions of events for twenty years before. No wonder that Dublin Castle was fluttered by his reports. Here is clearly one of them, and it serves to show why it was that the Government were so anxious in 1784 to secure O'Leary by a subsidy:—
A corps called the Irish Brigade was raised in Dublin, of which nineteen out of twenty were Roman Catholics, and they appointed Father O'Leary, an itinerant friar, their chaplain. I have been assured that they exceeded in number all the other Volunteer corps in the city.
And again:—
In the summer of the year 1783, the Irish Brigade, with the Dublin Independent Volunteers, commanded by James Napper Tandy and Matthew Dowling, formed an encampment between Roebuck and Dublin, under the pretext of studying tactics and learning camp duty, though it was well known that they were hatching revolutionary projects. It is to be observed that the war, the only pretext for their arming, was now at an end; yet many corps in different parts of the kingdom resolved not to lay down their arms but with their lives.[540]
Musgrave's construction of the above, as in many other incidents, is not wholly correct; though in his estimate of Tandy and Dowling, both Protestants, he was accurate enough.
If O'Leary played the part assigned and attributed to him, never did face more belie internal baseness, or was more exquisitely fashioned to command the confidence of its dupes. The 'Gentleman's Magazine' for February 1802 contains a study of 'Father Arthur' from the pen of Mr. Pratt.
His manners [he says] were the most winning and artless, anticipating his goodwill and urbanity before he opened his lips; and when they were opened, his expressions did but ratify what those manners had before ensured. And you had a further earnest of this in the benign and ineffable smile of a countenance so little practised in guile that it at the same time invited to confidence, and denoted an impossibility of your being betrayed.
Curran, addressing the Irish House of Commons in 1787, revealed a trait highly honourable to the friar: 'Mr. O'Leary was, to his knowledge, a man of the most innocent and amiable simplicity of manners in private life. The reflection of twenty years in a cloister had severely regulated his passions and deeply informed his understanding.'[541] Curran's knowledge was partly derived from the fact that O'Leary belonged to 'The Monks of the Screw,' often regarded as a convivial club; but 'whose more important object,' writes Hardy, the biographer of Charlemont, 'was a co-operation of men holding a general similarity of political principles resolved to maintain the rights and constitution of their country.' Previously, O'Leary had dedicated his Miscellaneous Tracts 'to the Dignitaries and Brethren of the Monks of St. Patrick,' addressing them, with his wonted humour, as 'Reverend Fathers and illustrious Brethren.'