On the other hand, the Irish Protestant peasantry, even when republican, could feel little confidence in a sudden, close alliance, offensive and defensive, with the descendants of mortal enemies against fellow Protestant rulers. Accordingly, the so-called United Irish revolt proved the most disunited rebellion imaginable. The Rev. Mr. Gordon, a Protestant, admits* that some Irish Protestants believed it their destiny to exterminate Roman Catholics, while the actual massacres of Protestants at Scullabogue and elsewhere during the revolution prove that a similar idea inspired some Roman Catholic insurgents.

As if, though unintentionally, to warn both Irish Catholics and Protestants from joining in this ill-fated revolt, the French manifestoes denouncing all religion effectually prevented

able paper written by an Irish Catholic in 1711, in the possession of the Catholic Lord Fingall, beseeching the British Parliament to make good the Treaty of Limerick, and accusing the Irish Parliament of encroaching on its supreme authority, and charges the colonists generally with ingratitude to the mother country, "to which they owe so much."

* Gordon's History of the '98 Rebellion.

connection with the Irish clergy of any de

nomination.

The "United Irish" leaders thus soon found themselves alone, betrayed and deceived, yet chiefly through their own ignorance of Irish feeling. Arrested by mean, low informers like Newell and Jemmy O'Brien, tried, condemned, executed, or banished without the least attempt at rescue, their fate proved that they had never obtained their fancied influence over the Irish people. Yet they usually displayed, even in their last speeches, that remarkable eloquence which had probably imposed on themselves as well as on their few deluded followers.*

Yet it must not be inferred that loyalty to British rule caused the complete failure or collapse of the "United Irish" movement. Disaffection towards British authority was quite as deep

* "Every popular Government has experienced the effects of rude or artificial eloquence. The coldest nature is animated, the firmest reason is moved by the rapid communication of the prevailing impulse, and each hearer is affected by his own passions and by those of the surrounding multitude."-Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol ii. chap. xx.

rooted and general after the revolts of '98 and 1803 as before their commencement.

The truth seems to be that in neither of these revolutionary failures was the real spirit of Irish discontent suppressed or even diminished. The enthusiasm of eloquent leaders hurried a few thousand excitable and thoughtless specimens of an excitable race into rebellion, while the mass. of the people remained passive, more through aversion to atheism, then associated with republican revolution, than from any attachment to existing laws.

This distrust of a revolt, headed by avowed enemies of all religion, was neither caused by fear of British power nor by attachment to British legislation; and thus the vision of a United Irish Republic, allied with French atheists, in a great measure dissolved of itself. Unsuited to Irish Protestants, who naturally distrusted alliance with those who still considered them invaders, it was equally unsuited to sincere Catholics, whose religion its allied promoters. openly denounced.

In examining Irish history, especially since the Reformation, the conduct, motives, and position

of the Roman Catholic clergy require calm and earnest consideration. Yet neither Protestant nor Catholic historians have been very successful in their treatment of this subject. The former usually blame and denounce them, the latter usually praise and admire ; but generally, whenever Irish Catholic priests are mentioned, feelings of prejudice in their favour or against them are aroused, which alike oppose that strict veracity so essential to the moral value of history. Writers desiring to impart the whole truth about the '98 revolt should not keep Ireland alone before them, as many seem to do. The state and history of Christian Europe, Great Britain especially, must be studied and remembered before and during a fair examination of all Irish political history.

The Protestant reformation throughout Europe had partly succeeded and partly failed. Religious enthusiasts eagerly expected the abolition of Roman Catholicism, or the ultimate extinction of all Christian doctrines which assailed it; but neither result occurred.

The end of the political contest-for the doctrinal one still continues-left the north of

Europe Protestant, while the south remained Catholic. In the British Empire the religious contest was peculiarly severe. In Scotland Roman Catholicism made less resistance than in

England and Ireland. It vanished completely from the majority of Scottish minds, which were then for some time divided in a fierce doctrinal contest between different forms of Protestantism. In England the old Church resisted Protestant attacks with far more vigour and determination.

The royal family were remarkably divided in religious opinion, which has caused opposite inferences from various historians as to their motives. Henry VIII. was first a Catholic, then a Protestant. His daughters, the Catholic Queen Mary and the Protestant Queen Elizabeth, encouraged and persecuted the old and new churches with vehement eagerness. Their successors, James I. and Charles I., were both Protestants; the first detested Roman Catholicism, the latter apparently preferred it to any form of Protestantism except his own, that of Anglicanism.* After his death the religious

Macaulay's History of England.