Saint Germains had entitled him to expect. The Lord
Lieutenant was in the camp. His bodily and mental infirmities had
perceptibly increased within the last few weeks. The slow and uncertain
step with which he, who had once been renowned for vigour and agility,
now tottered from his easy chair to his couch, was no unapt type of the
sluggish and wavering movement of that mind which had once pursued its
objects with a vehemence restrained neither by fear nor by pity, neither
by conscience nor by shame. Yet, with impaired strength, both physical
and intellectual, the broken old man clung pertinaciously to power. If
he had received private orders not to meddle with the conduct of the
war, he disregarded them. He assumed all the authority of a sovereign,
showed himself ostentatiously to the troops as their supreme chief, and
affected to treat Saint Ruth as a lieutenant. Soon the interference of
the Viceroy excited the vehement indignation of that powerful party in
the army which had long hated him. Many officers signed an instrument by
which they declared that they did not consider him as entitled to their
obedience in the field. Some of them offered him gross personal insults.
He was told to his face that, if he persisted in remaining where he was
not wanted, the ropes of his pavilion should be cut. He, on the other
hand, sent his emissaries to all the camp fires, and tried to make a
party among the common soldiers against the French general. [97]

The only thing in which Tyrconnel and Saint Ruth agreed was in dreading
and disliking Sarsfield. Not only was he popular with the great body
of his countrymen; he was also surrounded by a knot of retainers whose
devotion to him resembled the devotion of the Ismailite murderers to
the Old Man of the Mountain. It was known that one of these fanatics, a
colonel, had used language which, in the mouth of an officer so high in
rank, might well cause uneasiness. "The King," this man had said, "is
nothing to me. I obey Sarsfield. Let Sarsfield tell me to kill any
man in the whole army; and I will do it." Sarsfield was, indeed, too
honourable a gentleman to abuse his immense power over the minds of
his worshippers. But the Viceroy and the Commander in Chief might not
unnaturally be disturbed by the thought that Sarsfield's honour was
their only guarantee against mutiny and assassination. The consequence
was that, at the crisis of the fate of Ireland, the services of the
first of Irish sold