The murder of a little child by a yeoman named Woolagan excited, even in those days, a feeling of abhorrence, and Plowden, in his 'History of Ireland,' notices Woolagan's acquittal by the court-martial which tried him, but does not cite the evidence. This we find in the 'Dublin Magazine' for October 1798. There it will be seen that the murderer threw the onus on the general orders issued by Captain Armstrong. Phillips and Curran, who have written of that man, do not appear to have read this trial. The crime was proved and not denied, yet Woolagan was acquitted. But the Viceroy, Lord Cornwallis, condemned the verdict, and disqualified the president of the court-martial, Lord Enniskillen, from again presiding in that capacity.
Captain Armstrong, though hot-tempered, was capable of generous acts, and his redeeming points must not be ignored. He was a bad hater, a good laugher. Affable to all, he frequently went out of his way to be civil; and with him sweet words had more than their proverbial value. In days when landlordism reigned with iron sceptre, he showed indulgence to his tenantry; but when giving leases, or using his influence with higher lords of the soil for that end, he cunningly got his own life inserted as a beneficial interest to the tenants. Thus in the hot-bed of Ribbonism he gloried to the end in a sort of charmed life. He survived until April 20, 1858, when he died at Clara, in the King's County, after having drawn from Dublin Castle 500l. a year, or about 29,464l. Castlereagh, who had urged him to his work, recommended him for a pension, and predeceased him by nearly forty years, might have deemed this sum excessive had he lived to see it paid.
Seeking to disarm prejudice and cultivate rural friendship, Armstrong maintained cordial relations with the peasantry. He would enter their cabins, sit with rude hosts, and converse with their wives on various domestic points solely of interest to themselves. We must suppose that, consistently with his later utterance, their children attracted from him no moving manifestation of regard. His long life had one decided advantage. It is stated that he lived down every political enemy and contemporary, becoming in the end downright popular. His face, familiar from childhood even to old men, became at last endeared to early memories, and his neighbour, Captain Fuller, who attended his funeral, testifies to the almost incredible fact that he saw some well-known Ribbonmen, who were present, weep, and horny hands upraised which, in the hot blood of youth, had dispensed 'the wild justice of revenge.'[711]
FOOTNOTES:
[692] The fact that Mr. Lecky, when noticing the Sheares, tells his readers to 'see a curious anecdote about them' in a former book of mine, affords in itself an excuse for now offering something new. Vide England in the Eighteenth Century, viii. 191.
[693] Ridgeway's Report of the Trial of the Sheares, p. [129].
[694] The will of Sheares senior lends no support to this often repeated statement; but he commits his children to the care of Lord Shannon, a relative of their mother. This peer had been created, in 1786, Baron Carleton in the peerage of England, and hence the confusion.
[695] Rise and Fall of the Irish Nation, p. [365]. (Paris, 1833.)
[696] She did not long survive the great shock, but a prolonged purgatory was reserved for Henry's widow. She never raised her head, loved to occupy a darkened room, and always spent in fasting and prayer the anniversary of his death. Like her husband she was a Protestant.
[697] Brutal and bungling as all this was, it would appear that, from the first, it was designed that a cruel butchery should desecrate their death. The original warrant for their execution orders that:—