turned the conversation into a tone of light badinage which perplexed
and baffled the man. One came to seriously put his lordship on his
guard by acquainting him with the fact that his own coachman was in the
habit of going to mass. 'Is it possible?' cried Chesterfield: 'then I
will take care the fellow shall not drive me there.' A {251} courtier
burst into his apartment one morning, while he was sipping his
chocolate in bed, with the startling intelligence that the Papists were
rising in Connaught. 'Ah,' he said, looking at his watch, ''tis nine
o'clock--time for them to rise!' There was evidently no dealing with
such a viceroy as this, who showed such insensibility to the perils of
Protestantism and the evil designs of the dangerous Papists. Indeed he
was seen to distinguish by his peculiar admiration a Papist beauty,
Miss Ambrose, whom he declared to be the only 'dangerous Papist' he had
met in Ireland." Chesterfield himself has left an exposition of his
policy which we may well believe to be genuine. "I came determined,"
he wrote many years after, "to proscribe no set of persons whatever,
and determined to be governed by none. Had the Papists made any
attempt to put themselves above the law, I should have taken good care
to have quelled them again. It was said that my lenity to the Papists
had wrought no alteration either in their religious or their political
sentiments. I did not expect that it would; but surely that was no
reason for cruelty towards them."

[Sidenote: 1745-1746--Chesterfield's recall]

It is true that Lord Chesterfield's conduct in Ireland has been found
fault with by no less devoted a friend of Ireland than Burke. In his
letter to a peer of Ireland on the Penal Laws against the Irish
Catholics, Burke says: "This man, while he was duping the credulity of
Papists with fine words in private, and commending their good behavior
during a rebellion in Great Britain--as it well deserved to be
commended and rewarded--was capable of urging penal laws against them
in a speech from the Throne, and of stimulating with provocatives the
wearied and half-exhausted bigotry of the then Parliament of Ireland."
But Burke was a man whose public virtue was too high and unbending to
permit him to make allowance for the political arts and crafts of a
Chesterfield. It is quite true that Chesterfield recommended in his
speech that the Irish Parliament should inquire into the working of the
Penal Laws in orde