This temperate refutation excited a perfect tempest of furious invective in the Irish House of Commons. Mr. M'Naughten, and "two virulent barristers, Francis Hutcheson and Cunnyngham Plunket,"* humanely suggested summary execution as the fittest measure to be adopted towards the rash assertions of their own honour-a proposition not much more execrable than the one made on the previous 24th March, by Lord Farnham, who submitted "to the wisdom of the House whether it would not be right and necessary, that military executions should have retrospect to the persons who were then confined, and that they should be disposed of as expeditiously as possible." The humanity of Lord Castlereagh interposed itself between this brutal suggestion, and the prisoners; and on the former occasion, military execution was not done. The prisoners were merely remanded to close confinement, and the visits of their friends and relatives strictly forbidden. During this confinement, the Government proceeded, in its career of blood and calumny. In September, an act passed the houses of parliament, professedly to carry into effect the conditions of the treaty. That such was not its object must be clear from the fact, that so far from permitting the state prisoners to emigrate, according to these conditions, twenty of the parties who signed the compact, were sent to Scotland, and kept for upwards of four years, in close confinement. That the real object of this miscalled act of amnesty, was to put upon the shameless records of the legislature a statutary falsehooda gross calumny upon the leaders of the United Irishmen, is apparent from its preamble. The act referred to is the 38th Geo. III. c. 78, which recites-" Whereas, during the wicked and unnatural rebellion which hath broken out in this kingdom, several persons who had taken up arms against His Majesty, or had traitorously and wickedly corresponded with and adhered to his enemies, or had been otherwise engaged in fomenting the said rebellion, and acting therein, have been apprehended and

Pieces of Irish History, 162.-Irish Patriotism in those days was a strange thing. The eloquent opponent of a Union is found, but a year, before the "virulent" advocate for doing military execution on men at least as honest as himself!

† Debates in the House of Commons. Commons' Journal, March, 1798. This proposal is justified in the Dublin University Magazine, for December, 1843, p. 690; and the classic writer humanely suggests, that the Government, in acceding to his proposition, would have but followed the example of Cicero, and would have done well in reviving the tragedy of the Tullianum!

committed to prison for such their treasons, several of whom being conscious of their flagrant and enormous guilt, have expressed their contrition for the same, and have most humbly implored his Majesty's mercy, and that he would be graciously pleased to order all further prosecution against them to stop and surcease, and to grant his royal pardon to them, on condition of their being transported, &c., to any foreign country, &c.”

Let the reader who feels any interest in the characters of men, who suffered, for what they at all events conceived to be, the happiness of this country, turn to the memoir which they prepared in fulfilment of their arrangement with Government, and which it is to be remembered was rejected by the agent of Government, because it was a vindication of the United Irishmen, and he will certainly find no proof of these statements-no whimpering contrition—no mean demand of pardon.* Again, let the examinations of the prisoners-even in the appendix of wilful falsehood which follows the Report of the Committee of Secrecy-be read, and the same bold honesty, the same probably rash adherence to dangerous convictions, will be found to give a direct contradiction to this preamble. The Government, bad as it was, did not ask for any mean submissions; they were content with falsely representing that they had been made. Dr. Macnevin, in reply to a question of the Archbishop of Cashel, suggested by pious horror at the independent notions of an acknowledged traitor, said, "I have not, I own, any idea of sacrificing the interests of Ireland to those of any other country; nor why we should not in that, as in every other respect, be as free as the English themselves."† This is not the language of recantation. The Speaker asked the same person whether the people would consider themselves bound hereafter by the oaths of the Union? He was answered thus-" I, who am going to be an emigrant from my country, am dispensed from answering that question; yet I acknowledge, that were I to stay, I would think myself bound by them." Does this speak consciousness of guilt, contrition, or abject supplication? That the prisoners themselves were utterly unaware of the pusillanimity imputed, by the preamble of the 38th Geo. III., to them, may be inferred from the steps they took to refute the calumny, and by the threats

* Pieces of Irish History, 142.

† Ibid, 196.

Ibid, 211

which were made, if they persisted in publishing their denial. Having, by chance, seen a copy of the act in a London newspaper, one of the calumniated parties, Samuel Neilson, prepared a letter of refutation addressed to the editor, stating that there had been no retraction-no expression of sorrow for "unnatural rebellion"—no demand for pardon. But that the state prisoners had entered into a treaty with Government, by which they expected to stop the effusion of blood, and to terminate the afflictions of the country. A copy of this letter was sent to Lord Castlereagh; and, as the state prisoners had stipulated for freedom of publication, they did not anticipate any interference on the part of the Executive. This was ridiculous confidence, though, probably taking into consideration the subsequent conduct of that unrighteous body, it was wise not to have stimulated their appetite for oppression. Shortly after Lord Castlereagh had received the communication from Neilson, the latter was visited by two of the Government agents, Mr. Marsden and the indefatigable Cooke, who conveyed to him a message direct from the Lord Lieutenant. He was told, that if he published that letter, it was the firm determination of the Lord Lieutenant to abandon the conditions of the compact and to cause civil and military executions to proceed as before! These were the men who ruled our country at that time, men capable of recording falsehood in their abominable edicts, and of preventing its refutation by threatening the sword and the rope! These were the men against whose unholy rule, treason and rebellion were "unnatural!" This message was not from the remorseless Camden; it proceeded from the lips of Lord Cornwallis. It is, however, but just to him to remember, that he was surrounded by such advisers as Castlereagh; and that he was aided and assisted in the infamy of his conduct by the House of Commons, where propositions, equal in remorseless cruelty to his own, had been repeatedly and gravely made by men who assumed to be peculiarly the friends of the people.' In the long list of oppressions inflicted by the Anglo-Irish Government upon its victims, there is scarcely one of them, more full of refined cruelty than this. The character of men who were dear to the people was traduced in a solemn act of Parliament; they were represented as repentant sinners against their king; as having confessed their flagrant and enormous guilt; and as having implored pardon.

The truth was no where told that they had consented to abandon their country, and to submit to the searching inquisition of two parliamentary committees, for the purpose of saving the lives of their countrymen. Their motive was grossly misrepresented; and when indignant honour would have repudiated the calumny, it was silenced by the threat of resuming the career of decimation, by the aid of drumhead judges and military hangmen. That was, indeed, a time of horror, full of pregnant warning to future Governments, as well as to impatient patriotism; preaching forbearance and mercy to the one, and caution and much endurance to the other. The wise humanity of our days will not refuse the lesson.

A Government capable of using this artifice, was capable of any wrong. Twenty of the gentlemen who entered into the compact, and who fulfilled its conditions with exemplary correctness, after some interval of confinement in the prisons of Dublin -hateful to them as the scenes of the sufferings, and death of their friends were transmitted to Fort St. George, in Scotland, where, for four years, they were, in breach of all honour and forgetfulness of all treaties, kept closely imprisoned. The humanity of the governor, Colonel Stuart, a Scotchman, contended with his duty and instructions in rendering their condition at all endurable. In this list of exiles-driven from Ireland by its factious Government-were Thomas Addis Emmett, William James Macnevin, and William Sampson.* After more than four years' imprisonment, those gentlemen, as well as the other prisoners, obtained their freedom, and their subsequent fate will be found detailed at large in Dr. Madden's very interesting memoirs of the United Irishmen, to which I have been so much indebted for the facts in the preceding pages.

It is hoped, that though of necessity, the events growing out of the existence of the society of the United Irishmen, have been but briefly dealt with in this Introduction, its perusal will enable the reader to appreciate more fully the interesting trials which

* Of these three men, the first became the leading member of the bar of New York; the second, one of the first medical men in that city; and the third, an advocate of great distinction in the honourable profession of which Thomas Addis Emmet was the greatest ornament. Is this any comment upon the Government, whose shrewdness found in them unsafe citizens of a state, administered by a Clare and a Castlereagh? A late writer, in speaking of the leaders of the rebellion of 1798, says that they were "almost without exception, shallow, and conceited sciolists." University Magazine (December, 1843), p. 685.

follow. They have been arranged with care; the best reports in all cases have been obtained; and they are printed in the order in which they occurred. Their succession, too, will serve to indicate the progress of the assaults made by Government upon public liberty-from the attack upon the press in the prosecution of Archibald Hamilton Rowan, down to the various trials for high treason with which they sought to consummate their triumph, over the principles and projects, of the United Irishmen.

The men with whom this Introduction and these trials are conversant, were, no doubt, traitors; but it is probable that the details, both here and there given, may impart a meaning to that word, more restricted than that which it enjoys in the comprehen sive language of a statute, or in the unlimited phraseology of a court sycophant, or an Irish loyalist. No man will unconditionally defend the rash projects in which they embarked; but let us not be blinded there is no motive for such meanness now-to the unbounded devotion and disinterested zeal with which they sought, after their own fashion, to serve their country. And let it be always remembered, that if they abandoned the straight and open course of the constitution, it was when an arbitrary, a dishonest, and sanguinary government had made its ancient ways unsafe and perilous to the lovers of civil and religious equality.