armed or murdered in their houses, or on their way to parade ground.' They added, 'that the daily threats (actually executed in many late instances here) of personal and other injury to those continuing yeomen or supporters of them; and the loss of all trade or employment from the numerous body United, or affecting to be so through fear or interest,' had weakened the yeomanry, and that the protection of the country in a time of extreme danger, and when measures of desperate vigour might be required, could not be safely entrusted to mere volunteers, liable to no coercion except honour and regard to character.1 It will be sufficiently evident to anyone who considers the subject with common candour, that under such circumstances numerous military outrages were certain to occur. The only method by which the disarming could be carried out and the men who were engaged in nightly outrages detected, was by nightly raids, in rebellious districts. The Chief Secretary strongly pressed upon the commander in the North, that the soldiers searching for arms should always be accompanied by a superior officer; but Lake answered that, though he would do what he could to prevent abuses, this, at least, was absolutely impossible. Success could only be attained by surprise, by the simultaneous search of innumerable widely scattered cabins. If it was known that a search was proceeding in one place, arms were at once concealed in fifty others. It was impossible that an officer could be present in every cabin which was being searched, and the task had to be largely entrusted to little groups of private soldiers. No one who knows what an army is, and how it is recruited, could expect that this should go on without producing instances of gross violence and outrage, and without seriously imperilling discipline. This, however, was by no means the worst. The danger of invasion and armed rebellion was so great, and the regular troops in Ireland were so few, that it was necessary to collect them in points of military importance, and to entrust services which did not require a serious display of force to militiamen and yeomen, newly enrolled and most imperfectly disciplined. The yeomen, from their knowledge of the country and its people, 1 Memorial of magistrates of the counties of Down and Armagh, and officers of the yeomanry, to General Lake, March 18, 1797. CH. XXVIII. THE YEOMANRY. 301 were peculiarly efficient in searching for arms, and they were the force which was naturally and primarily intended for the preservation of internal security, as the regular troops were for the defence of the country against a foreign invasion. The creation of a large yeomanry force for the former purpose had been, as we have seen, one of the projects of Fitzwilliam. It had been strongly and repeatedly urged by Grattan and by Parsons, and, as we shall presently see, the most liberal and enlightened English commander entirely agreed with the most liberal members of the Irish Parliament, that the suppression of outrage which did not rise to the height of actual armed rebellion, ought to be the special province of the yeomanry. But such a force was at this time perfectly certain to be guilty of gross violence. It was recruited chiefly in districts which had been for years the scene of savage faction fights between the Defenders and the Peep of Day Boys; between the United Irishmen and the Orangemen ; and it was recruited in the face of the most formidable obstacles. The United Irishmen made it one of their main objects to prevent the formation of this new and powerful force, and they pursued this object with every kind of outrage, intimidation, abuse, and seduction. There had been not a few murders. There were countless instances of attacks on the houses of the yeomen. Their families were exposed to constant insult, and to constant peril. The system had already begun in some disaffected districts of treating the yeomen as if they were lepers, and refusing all dealings with them; while in other districts every art was employed to seduce them from their allegiance. That a powerful yeomanry force should have been created in spite of all these obstacles, and at a time when Irishmen were pouring into the regular army, the militia, and the navy, appears to me to be a striking proof both of the military spirit and of the sturdy independence and self-reliance which then characterised the loyalists of Ireland. The estimate first laid before Parliament was for 20,000 men, but in six months above 37,000 men were arrayed, and during the rebellion the force exceeded 50,000, and could, if necessary, have been increased.1 Report of the Committee of Secrecy of 1798, p. 5. Some interesting particulars about the Irish yeomen will be found in a History of the Origin of the Irish Yeomanry, by But although the United Irishmen failed in preventing the formation of this great force, they at least succeeded in profoundly affecting its character. In great districts which were torn by furious factions it consisted exclusively of the partisans of one faction, recruited under circumstances well fitted to raise party animosity to fever heat. Such men, with uniforms on their backs and guns in their hands, and clothed with the authority of the Government, but with scarcely a tinge of discipline and under no strict martial law, were now let loose by night on innumerable cabins. These circumstances do not excuse, but they explain and largely palliate, their misdeeds, and they do much to divide the blame. Disarming had plainly become a matter of the first necessity at a time when a great portion of the population were organising, at the command of a seditious conspiracy, for the purpose of co-operating with an expected French invasion, and it could hardly be carried out in Ireland without excessive violence. Martial law is always an extreme remedy of the State, but when it is administered by competent officers and supported by an overwhelming and well-disciplined force, its swift stern justice is not always an evil. But few things are more terrible than martial law when the troops are at once undisciplined, inadequate in numbers, and involved in the factions of the country they are intended to subdue. That many and horrible abuses took place before the outbreak of the Rebellion of 1798 is not open to doubt, but it is very difficult to form a confident opinion of the extent to which they prevailed in Ulster in the spring and summer of 1797. In his earliest letters, after the disarming had begun, Lake wrote, 'I really do not know of any excesses committed by the military since this unpleasant mode of warfare has commenced,' but he acknowledged that 'some irregularities (though I really believe very few) may have been committed . . . chiefly by the yeomanry, . . . whose knowledge of the country gives them an opportunity of gratifying their party spirit and private quarrels ;' and he added, 'I fear they will be of very little use if they in the history of the volunteers, appears to have been the cradle of the yeomanry movement, and the first considerable review of yeomanry was held there by General Knox. CH. XXVIII. THE ANCIENT BRITONS. 303 are not put under military law, as at present they are under very little control, either officers or men.' Pelham, at first at least, fully accepted this statement, and wrote a few weeks after the disarming, 'I am perfectly convinced that so strong a measure could not have been carried into execution with more temper, mildness, and firmness.'2 In June, however, he wrote to Lake that he had heard with great regret, that many of the public-houses in Belfast which were centres of the United Irishmen had been wrecked by the Monaghan Militia, and some soldiers of the same regiment attacked and destroyed the offices and types of the Northern Star,' which was the chief seditious organ at Belfast.3 6 But in the process of seeking arms in the country districts, far worse acts seem to have been perpetrated. A Welsh regiment of fencible cavalry called the Ancient Britons,' stationed at Newry, reduced a country which was probably the most seditious and disorganised in Ulster to complete submission, but it did so by means which left an ineffaceable impression of horror and resentment on the popular mind. In the absence of any searching judicial investigation, it is impossible to say how much of exaggeration there was in the popular reports; but the very absence of such investigation is in itself a condemnation of the Government, and it is but right to say that there is a confidential letter written by an eye-witness, in the Government archives, which sustains the worst charges against it. It was written by a certain John Giffard, who was an officer in the Dublin Militia, engaged in the task of searching for arms. mentions that he had been present at numerous, but invariably unsuccessful, expeditions for the purpose of discovering and arresting insurgents with arms in their hands, but that another practice was now adopted. The Britons' burned a great number of houses, and the object of emulation between them and the Orange yeomen seems to be, who shall do most mischief to 1 Lake to Pelham, March 17, 19, 1797. 2 Pelham to Lake, March 29, 1797. Pelham to Lake (secret and confidential), June 6, 1797; Madden's United Irishmen, iv. 22, 23. I suppose this to be the John Giffard, a captain in the Dublin Militia, concerning whom the reader may find some particulars in Madden's United Irishmen, ii. 291-296. He held several appointments under the Government, edited a newspaper, and is furiously abused by Dr. Madden as a persecuting Orangeman. wretches who certainly may have seditious minds, but who are at present quiet and incapable of resistance.' He describes an expedition to the mountains to search for arms: His party returned to the main body of the Ancient Britons, 'to which,' he says, 'I was directed by the smoke and flames of burning houses, and by the dead bodies of boys and old men slain by the Britons, though no opposition whatever had been given by them, and, as I shall answer to Almighty God, I believe a single gun was not fired, but by the Britons or yeomanry. I declare there was nothing to fire at, old men, women, and children excepted. From ten to twenty were killed outright; many wounded, and eight houses burned.' Sixteen prisoners were taken, 'poor wretched peasants, whom they marched into Newry, and were asked why they made any prisoners at all, meaning that we should have killed them. The next day they were all proved perfectly innocent. . . . But the worst of the story still remains; two of the Britons desiring to enter a gentleman's house, the yard gate was opened to them by a lad, whom for his civility they shot and cut in pieces. These men had straggled away from their officers.' A scuffle had taken place between two of the Ancient Britons and two members of Giffard's regiment, in which one of the latter was killed and another desperately wounded; a coroner's inquest had brought in a verdict of murder against the Welsh soldiers, and Giffard much feared that it would be impossible to restrain his own soldiers from reprisals.1 This letter throws a ghastly light on the condition of Ulster, and the levity with which these things appear to have been regarded is even more horribly significant. There are frequent 1 John Giffard to Cooke (most private), Dundalk, June 5, 1797, I.S.P.O. The following is Plowden's account of this transaction: Information had been lodged that a house near Newry, contained concealed arms; a party of the Ancient Britons repaired to the house, but not finding the object of their search, they set it on fire. The peasantry of the neighbourhood came running from all sides to extinguish the flames, believing the fire to have been accidental. It was the first military conflagration in that part of the country. As they came up, they were attacked in all direc tions and cut down by the Fencibles. Thirty were killed, among whom were a woman and two children. An old man of seventy, seeing the dreadful slaughter of his neighbours and friends, fled for safety to some adjacent rocks; he was pursued, and though on his knees imploring mercy, his head was cut off at a blow.' (Plowden, ii. 626, 627.) 2 In a long letter on the accusations brought against soldiers in Ireland, Camden says, 'The Ancient Britons, commanded by Sir W. Wynne, did, on their first landing, act perhaps with too much attachment to |