e does not indeed appear to have been greedy of
unlawful gain. But he did not restrain with a sufficiently firm hand
the crowd of subordinate functionaries whom Coningsby's example and
protection had encouraged to plunder the public and to sell their good
offices to suitors. Nor was the new Viceroy of a temper to bear hard
on the feeble remains of the native aristocracy. He therefore speedily
became an object of suspicion and aversion to the Anglosaxon settlers.
His first act was to send out the writs for a general election. The
Roman Catholics had been excluded from every municipal corporation; but
no law had yet deprived them of the county franchise. It is probable
however that not a single Roman Catholic freeholder ventured to approach
the hustings. The members chosen were, with few exceptions, men animated
by the spirit of Enniskillen and Londonderry, a spirit eminently heroic
in times of distress and peril, but too often cruel and imperious in
the season of prosperity and power. They detested the civil treaty of
Limerick, and were indignant when they learned that the Lord Lieutenant
fully expected from them a parliamentary ratification of that odious
contract, a contract which gave a licence to the idolatry of the
mass, and which prevented good Protestants from ruining their Popish
neighbours by bringing civil actions for injuries done during the war.
[402]

On the fifth of October 1692 the Parliament met at Dublin in Chichester
House. It was very differently composed from the assembly which had
borne the same title in 1689. Scarcely one peer, not one member of the
House of Commons, who had sate at the King's Inns, was to be seen. To
the crowd of O's and Macs, descendants of the old princes of the island,
had succeeded men whose names indicated a Saxon origin. A single O,
an apostate from the faith of his fathers, and three Macs, evidently
emigrants from Scotland, and probably Presbyterians, had seats in the
assembly.

The Parliament, thus composed, had then less than the powers of the
Assembly of Jamaica or of the Assembly of Virginia. Not merely was the
Legislature which sate at Dublin subject to the absolute control of the
Legislature which sate at Westminster: but a law passed in the fifteenth
century, during the administration of the Lord Deputy Poynings, and
called by his name, had provided that no bill which had not been
considered and approved by the Privy Council of England should be
brought into either