regarded it with implacable hostility. But his own ideal was visibly fading, and it was becoming evident that the policy of 1782 was not destined to succeed. In spite of the Place Bill, the Pension Bill, and the Catholic Bill of 1793, the Parliament was sinking in character, influence, and popularity, and the independent minority had greatly diminished. This may be attributed, partly to the more determined attitude of hostility to reform which the Government had assumed, but in part also to a genuine feeling of panic and reaction which the French Revolution had produced in all privileged classes, and which had reduced to insignificant proportions the reform party in the English Legislature.

Outside the House, also, the position of Grattan was no longer what it had been. He was still followed by a large body of the country gentry, and of the more intelligent farmers and tradesmen of the North, but he was no longer sustained by a strong force of national enthusiasm. Another policy, other leaders and other principles, were in the ascendant, and they were hurrying the nation onward to other destinies. In all the utterances of Grattan at this time, private as well as public, a profound discouragement and a deep sense of coming calamities may be traced. In after years he spoke eloquently of the material prosperity that had grown up under the Irish Parliament, and of the many wise, liberal, and healing laws that it had passed, but his language at the time we are considering was in a different strain. He spoke of an experiment which had lasted for fourteen years, and which had failed. He declared that a general election in Ireland meant no more than 'an opportunity to exercise by permission of the army the solitary privilege to return a few representatives of the people to a House occupied by the representatives of boroughs,' and his own secession from that House was the most eloquent confession of defeat.'

One of the most alarming signs of the dangerous condition. of Ireland was the disaffection which now constantly appeared in the militia, and was not unfrequently discovered or suspected among the yeomanry and the regular troops. The seduction of soldiers was a main object of the United Irishmen, and Lake

1 See Grattan's Life, iv. 302.

CH. XXVIII.

SPREAD OF THE CONSPIRACY.

331

and Knox urged in many letters that it had proceeded so far that little or no reliance could be placed upon the militia, and that the introduction of a large additional force from England was imperatively needed. 'It answers no end,' wrote an active magistrate, 'to station small parties of the military in different cantonments, for they are regularly corrupted.'1 This evil was by no means confined to the North. Infinite pains were taken in Dublin to secure the presence of at least one United Irishman in every company, and sedition spread so fast that one regiment was actually removed, and the Lord Lieutenant doubted whether it would not be necessary to move a second from the capital, for the express purpose of checking the contamination. There were, in May, courts-martial sitting at the same time on disaffected soldiers, in Cork, Limerick, and Belfast. Several militiamen were condemned and shot; no less than seventy men in the Monaghan Militia confessed that they had been seduced into taking the oath of the United Irishmen, and, as might have been expected, the air was charged with vague rumours and suspicions, magnifying and multiplying the real dangers. Lake believed that many United Irishmen had enlisted in the yeomanry for the purpose of obtaining arms.3 Even the Orangemen were at one time suspected, and apparently not quite without reason, of having been tampered with. At another time, Camden wrote that he had heard, and was inclined to believe, that Archbishop Troy with six other priests had been sworn in. As the Archbishop, during a long, upright, and

2

these societies, and are returning to their loyalty.' (Camden to Portland (secret), May 30, 1797.) Among the papers of the United Irishmen seized at Belfast in April, was one urging them to make friends of the Catholics and Orangemen, as that was doing good in Armagh.' (I.S.P.O.)

Camden to Portland (private and confidential), May 6, 1797. Archbishop Troy was a Dominican, and the regular priests were believed to be much more dangerous than the secular priests. (See Castlereagh Correspondence, iii. 88, 89.) McNally was questioned about Troy, but could give no information. It is very probable,' he wrote, he [Troy] may be up, but by whom is, I think, a matter

consistent life, always showed himself one of the steadiest supporters of the law, and one of the strongest opponents of secret societies, this report may, I think, be most confidently discredited; but there is little doubt that many priests were in the conspiracy. Higgins expressed his belief, that there were not twenty loyal priests in Dublin.' 'The Catholic clergy,' McNally wrote in April, are to a man with the people,' and both he and Higgins warned the Government that the lower clergy were among the most active organisers of sedition, and also that the United Irishmen were taking special pains to enroll domestic servants, and to distribute them as spies through the chief houses in Ireland. Even in the Castle, and in the immediate circle of the Chief Secretary, it was boasted among the United Irishmen that they had sources of information.3

Among the numerous arrests that were made in the North, there were several which had great importance. In February, Arthur O'Connor was imprisoned for a seditious libel, as well as two brothers of the name of Simms, who were proprietors of the 'Northern Star.' The paper was, for some months, continued, under the editorship of Neilson; but after its offices had been wrecked, and its types destroyed by the Monaghan Militia, it was not revived. In April, on the information of a miniature painter named Newell, who had been at one time a Defender, and at another an United Irishman, the Government succeeded in arresting, in a single swoop, at Belfast, two whole committees, consisting of about forty persons, and in seizing a number of important papers, disclosing the organisation, objects, and extent of the society. A portion of these papers was soon after published by Parliament. They furnished decisive evidence that separation and a republic were the real ends of the conspiracy, and that a negotiation and correspondence with France

not to be discovered, as a priest most probably was the operator, and you may be assured he attends no organised society.' (J. W., May 22, 1797.)

F. H., May 25, 1797.

2 J. W., April 28, May 22, 29, Sept. 11, 1797. The spirit of disaffection is so great, that no gentleman can trust his Roman Catholic servants. A plot has been discovered (in which several of Mr. Conolly's servants were concerned), to let the

Defenders into the house of Castletown in the middle of the night, and some of these servants had been bred in his family from children. . . . It appears that one of the chief objects of the United Irishmen is to corrupt the servants universally, so as to obtain an avenue to every gentleman whose opposition they may dread.' (Camden to Portland (secret), May 30, 1797.)

F. Higgins, May 30, 1797.

CH. XXVIII.

NEWELL'S INFORMATION.

333

had long been going on, and they also furnished some more or less trustworthy evidence of the extent of its ramifications. It appeared, from the reports of the baronial committees, that rather more than 72,000 men had been enrolled in Ulster, and that the whole province was organised for revolt, by a multitude of small societies, each of which was limited to thirty-five members. The papers that were seized belonged to the eightieth of these societies in Belfast. Outside Ulster, only Dublin, Westmeath, and Kildare appear to have been, at this time, fully organised, though emissaries were busily extending the conspiracy through other parts of Ireland.1

Newell told more than was published by Parliament, and he is said to have been taken masked to various places in Belfast, to point out those whom he knew to be connected with the conspiracy. His most startling statement was, that he had himself been one of a secret committee of twelve members, which was formed for the express purpose of assassinating members of the society who were suspected of having betrayed it to the Government. There was a trial, he said, but not in the presence of the accused person, and if that person was found guilty, one or more members of the committee were chosen by lot to murder him. Newell mentioned that he had known of the assassination of several persons, and had himself been present when a soldier was first made drunk, and then flung over a bridge near Belfast, with weights in his pockets.2

It is certain that assassinations, and threats of assassination, constantly accompanied the United Irish movement, but it was pretended that these were mere isolated instances of private vengeance, provoked by the severities of the troops and of the Government, and the leading members of the society in Dublin have left on record a solemn protest against the charge of

Report of Secret Committee (Aug. 1798), Appendix, pp. xii, xxi, xxii.

2 Several papers relating to Newell will be found in the Irish State Paper Office. He afterwards quarrelled with the Government, and appears then to have pretended that his information had been false. A kind of autobiography, in which he accused himself of all kinds of enormities, and Cooke

of having incited him to perjury, was published in his name. It is reprinted by Dr. Madden, who contends that it is genuine. (United Irishmen, i. 531-580.) Newell is said to have been ultimately murdered. See, too, on Newell's information and retractation, Lord Clare's speech in the Debate in the Irish House of Lords, Feb. 19, 1798, pp. 100, 101.

having given any countenance or favour to them. They declared that they entirely disbelieved in the existence of a committee of assassination; that they had heard persons mentioned as being members of it, whom they knew, from 'the most private and confidential conversations, to be utterly abhorrent from that crime;' that in no communications from those who were placed at the head of the United Irishmen to the rest of that body, and in no official paper, was assassination ever inculcated, but frequently and fervently reprobated;''that it was considered by them with horror, on account of its criminality, and with personal dread, because it would render ferocious the minds of men in whose hands their lives were placed.'1 In the case of Emmet, this statement is corroborated by a document which was found among his papers, strongly censuring any resort to assassination, and it is, 1 believe, perfectly true, that the leaders of the conspiracy never, as a body, either publicly or secretly, gave any sanction to that crime. They comprised men with very various objects and characters. Some of them aimed only at the avowed and original objects of the society--a reform of Parliament, and an union of friendship and politics between the divided sects, and had become rebels only because they believed that English influence was being steadily employed to prevent both reform and emancipation. But others were passionate disciples of the French Revolution, at a time when tyrannicide was a favourite doctrine in France; they argued that the Insurrection Act, the imprisonments without trial, and the burning of houses, had emancipated them from all restraint, and, if they may be judged by their language, they would gladly, in the event of a successful insurrection, have reproduced in Ireland the French Reign of Terror. Of these men, John Sheares, who was on the Directory of the United Irishmen from March to May 1798, was a typical example. When O'Connell was a young man, he crossed over with him from France, and learnt that he had been present at the execution of Lewis XVI., attracted, as he said, by the love of the cause,' and the same spirit continued to animate him in Ireland. He wrote for the

1 See the memorial of Emmet, O'Connor, and McNevin to the Government in 1798 (Castlereagh Corre

spondence, i. 358, 359); and also the evidence of Emmet. (McNevin's Pieces of Irish History, p. 219.)