r, and had sunk, without trying the chances of a single
pitched field, into that slavery which was their fit portion. Many
signs indicated that another great spoliation and slaughter of the Saxon
settlers was meditated by the Lord Lieutenant. Already thousands
of Protestant colonists, flying from the injustice and insolence
of Tyrconnel, had raised the indignation of the mother country by
describing all that they had suffered, and all that they had, with too
much reason, feared. How much the public mind had been excited by the
complaints of these fugitives had recently been shown in a manner not
to be mistaken. Tyrconnel had transmitted for the royal approbation the
heads of a bill repealing the law by which half the soil of Ireland was
held, and he had sent to Westminster, as his agents, two of his Roman
Catholic countrymen who had lately been raised to high judicial
office; Nugent, Chief Justice of the Irish Court of King's Bench, a
personification of all the vices and weaknesses which the English then
imagined to be characteristic of the Popish Celt, and Rice, a Baron of
the Irish Exchequer, who, in abilities and attainments, was perhaps the
foremost man of his race and religion. The object of the mission was
well known; and the two Judges could not venture to show themselves in
the streets. If ever they were recognised, the rabble shouted, "Room for
the Irish Ambassadors;" and their coach was escorted with mock solemnity
by a train of ushers and harbingers bearing sticks with potatoes stuck
on the points. [446]

So strong and general, indeed, was at that time the aversion of the
English to the Irish that the most distinguished Roman Catholics
partook of it. Powis and Bellasyse expressed, in coarse and acrimonious
language, even at the Council board, their antipathy to the aliens.
[447] Among English Protestants that antipathy was still stronger and
perhaps it was strongest in the army. Neither officers nor soldiers were
disposed to bear patiently the preference shown by their master to a
foreign and a subject race. The Duke of Berwick, who was Colonel of the
Eighth Regiment of the Line, then quartered at Portsmouth, gave orders
that thirty men just arrived from Ireland should be enlisted. The
English soldiers declared that they would not serve with these
intruders. John Beaumont, the Lieutenant Colonel, in his own name and in
the name of five of the Captains, protested to the Duke's face against
this insult to the E