The proceedings of sir Charles Coote and his parliamentarians becoming insufferably violent and alarming, the confederates renewed their urgent solicitations to Ormond to lead them against these enemies to the crown; but he resisted their pressing entreaties, artfully observing that he was well convinced there was an absolute necessity of union, but that he would not act with those who had not received their authority from the king. He insisted with obstinacy, in the mean time, on the suppression of Glamorgan's treaty, which Charles had disavowed all knowledge of, and that the treaty of Dublin concluded with himself should be immediately published. If these overtures were not acceded to, he declared that the situation of the king's affairs in Dublin must compel him to seek some other method of recovering and supporting his authority in Ireland. The result of this was that the confederates agreed to the publication of the treaty with Ormond, which would immediately have taken place, had not Charles, who had surrendered to the Scottish army, in a letter ordered the marquis to desist from all further proceedings, and not to conclude a treaty with the Irish upon any terms whatsoever.

Although the marquis may have been persuaded that this order was extorted, yet it was not easy to persuade others; and anxiety, suspense, and confusion, every where prevailed: During which, lord Digby arriving from the Continent, declared that the king was held captive by the army, and that all his measures were the effect of compulsion, in order to suit the purposes of his worst enemies.

Ormond, however, not only prevented the loyal subjects of Charles from proceeding with vigour in his cause; but, basely deserting the reduced fortunes of his unfortunate monarch, treacherously entered into terms with the commissioners of the parliament, with whom he stipulated to surrender the castle of Dublin, the authority of lord lieutenant, and his sword, in consideration of receiving five thousand pounds immediately, two thousand pounds a-year for five years, and a release from all incumbrances upon his estate up to the beginning of the insurrection. After this shameful surrender he retired to England, whence he was compelled to escape to France.

The confederates after this having again met at Kilkenny, there

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took into consideration that his majesty was in restraint; "that all addresses to him were forbidden; and that some "members of parliament who had ventured to speak in his fa66 vour were expelled: therefore, in that extremity, there being no access to his majesty to implore either his justice or his mercy, all laws, either human or divine, did allow the said "catholics to take some other course in order to their defence "and preservation-not against his sacred majesty, but against "those who had laid violent hands on his person, who designed "to abolish the royal authority, and resolved to extirpate or "destroy the said catholics."

Ormond, meantime, after having been indignantly forced into exile by those very enemies of the king to whom he had, from mercenary motives, ignominiously betrayed his high trust and his own honour, again returned from France into Ireland, and arriving at Cork on the twenty-ninth of October, sixteen hundred and forty-eight, resolved to use the unshaken loyalty and severely tried attachment of the catholics to Charles as the instrument of his own revenge. He therefore dissembled for the moment his implacable hatred to the catholics, and affecting to place the fate of the king in their exertions, was received with universal acclamations. He was invited by the general assembly at Kilkenny to conclude a peace with them, and to join his efforts to those of the nation at large against the parliamentarians, who were soon to destroy monarchy, to abolish the hierarchy, and to extirpate the catholic religion. He still, however, rejected every condition of peace that related to the toleration of popery, or the repeal of any of the penal laws. During this delay lord Inchiquin's army revolted against the king, which defection the marquis seized as a pretext for completely delaying the definitive treaty.

By this unaccountable conduct of Ormond, notwithstanding the earnestness of the king to be reconciled to the confederates on any terms, the treaty was protracted till within one fortnight of the tragical end of Charles. Had he been actuated by any sense of the welfare of the state, any regard to the preservation of the constitution, any zeal for the support of his own religion, or any real attachment to his sovereign, he would not have declared "that the articles of the peace were not conde

"scended to, till all hopes of the treaty then on foot in England between the king and the parliament were overpassed, "and the army were not ashamed to proclaim their purpose, to "commit a horrid and execrable murder and parricide on the "sacred person of his majesty. This we mention, not as "thereby in the least degree to invalidate any of the conces"sions made unto these people, but, on the contrary to render “them in every point the more sacred and inviolable by how "much the necessity on his majesty's part for the granting "thereof is the greater, and the submission on their part to his majesty's authority, in such his great necessity, more oppor"tune and seasonable: as also to call the world (and whom"soever either any peace at all, or the terms of this peace,.. "may be distasteful unto) to testify hereafter, that as the full "benefit thereof cannot, without great injustice and somewhat "of ingratitude, (if we may so speak in the case of his ma"jesty with reference to this last act of theirs) be denied unto "them, so any blame thereof ought to be laid upon those alone "who have imposed the sad necessity, the saddest to which any king was ever reduced."

What share he assumed to himself of the disasters of his royal master, by having so long deprived him of the assistance of his catholic subjects, cannot be known; but certain it is, that this awful moment of embarrassment was the first in which he made any avowal favourable to that body of men. Besides the reluctant, the ungracious, and half-penitent admission, of their persevering attachment to the king in his utmost distress, he said in a letter to Lord Digby, written within a week of Charle's death, "I must say for this people, that I have observ"ed in them great readiness to comply with what I was able to "give them, and a very great sense of the king's sad condition." And in another letter of the same date to the prince of Wales, he mentions" the very eminent loyalty of the assembly, which " was not shaken by the success which God had permitted to "the monstrous rebellion in England; nor by the mischievous "practices of the no less malicious rebels in Ireland." Yet this loyal assembly had Ormond most cruelly persecuted, and to these malicious rebels did he surrender up the authority with which he was invested by his royal master.

The reign of the unfortunate Charles was terminated by the ignominy of his public execution, which melancholy catastrophe might have been prevented had he conducted himself with but tolerable sincerity and moderation towards his subjects both of England and Ireland. Had he possessed sufficient discernment to make a judicious choice of his ministers and favourites, or had he even decidedly opposed the measures of Ormond, and taken shelter amongst his faithful Irish catholic subjects, it is hard to say how far the power of the parliamentarians might have been checked: But the glaring weakness, irresolution, insincerity, and absurdity, apparent throughout the whole of his administration, recal to our recollection the words of a celebrated Latin writer which, indeed, we could almost be tempted to apply to the present rulers of these islands

"Quos vult perdere Deus dementat."*

So great and general was the indignation of the people of Ireland at the king's murder, that the pope's nuncio immediately left the kingdom, despairing of being any longer able to prevent the union of the catholic confederates with the protestant loyalists under the lord lieutenant, who was at Youghall when he received intelligence of the king's death, where he instantly proclaimed the prince of Wales king, by the title of Charles II.

*Those whom God wills to destroy he first makes mad.

CHAPTER VI.

IN the first effervescence of the horror which all conceived of the murder of Charles, the English and Irish vied with each other in their exertions against the parliamentarian rebels, whom they now denominated and treated as regicides. To this union were owing the first successful movements of Ormond's campaign in the reduction of most of the strong holds in the northern parts of the kingdom, except Londonderry. The pride of Ormond stimulated him above all things to regain possession of Dublin, which he had so basely surrendered. But the infamy of giving it up for lucre was aggravated by his disgraceful defeat at Rathmines, about three miles from Dublin, by a very inferior force under Michael Jones, the rebel governor of the city. This shameful disaster, coupled with the ready submission of Inchiquin's men, who instantly enlisted in Jones's army, and several other circumstances attending the conduct of Ormond on this occasion, naturally renewed in the Irish their former suspicions that he had still some secret understanding with the English rebels; and these suspicions were strengthened by the constant failure of all his subsequent endeavours against them.

The new king had expressly written from the Hague "that "he had received and was extremely well satisfied with the "articles of peace concluded with the Irish confederates, and "would confirm wholly and entirely all that was contained in