hastened to signalize its independence by forestalling the English Parliament in the choice of a regent.

Pitt was delaying matters in England, in hopes the king's illness might take a more favourable turn. Grattan seized the opportunity, when Parliament opened in February, to move that the Irish Parliament should vote an immediate address to the prince inviting him to an unrestricted regency. Vainly did the Government urge delay till the course of the English Houses should be determined; vainly did Fitzgibbon threaten an union as the consequence of a divergence of opinion in the two Parliaments, and vainly did he insist that the appointment of the prince should be with limitations, and argue that a collision might be serious if each country were to choose a different regent. The king's recovery was not contemplated. Fitzgibbon and the Government were believed to be a falling House. The rats of placemen rushed from it and filled the ranks of the Opposition. The motion was carried without a division. of Lords, led by the Duke of Leinster, Lord Charlemont, and Lord Pery, followed the example of the Commons, forty-five out of seventy-one peers voting for the address. When the address was carried up to the viceroy, Lord Buckingham, he refused to transmit it to England; and the Houses then appointed a deputation to cross the channel, and present it to the prince in person.

The House

To the confusion of the Opposition the king got well, and then the Government turned upon them, threatening to make every deserter "the victim of his vote" by prompt dismissal from office. Fifty-five of the

Opposition, amongst whom were seventeen peers, endeavoured to protect themselves by entering into a mutual engagement with each other not to accept any office or pension of which any of the party should be deprived, and to withhold their support from the Government. The Government determined that "the aristocracy which had been broken once before under his majesty's direction, and had combined again against English authority, must be broken again." Lord Townshend had spent half a million in the accomplishment of this honourable undertaking, and Fitzgibbon shamefully threatened a repetition of the process. Rewards and punishments were dealt out with an unsparing hand. The combination of fifty-five was broken up. Temptation was too great for some, though many held by their determination. Fifteen unfaithful placemen were summarily dismissed from office or lost their pensions. The faithful were rewarded with promotion. Some were bought back with steps in the peerage, or fresh offices of emolument. The wholesale corruption was appalling. To swell the number of the rewards at their disposal, the Government revived dormant employments, raised salaries, and increased commissionerships and seats at the revenue board. They even divided the lucrative office of weighmaster of butter at Cork, into three sections, the duties of which were performed by deputies at a salary of £200 a year, and gave them to three of their supporters. The pension-list which amounted to £100,000 a year, was augmented by the addition of a further annual sum of £13,040, given in annuities of various

sums to purchased peers or members of the Commons and their wives. Three earls became marquises; four viscounts became earls; two barons became viscounts; and seven Commoners, including Fitzgibbon, who was appointed lord-chancellor, were raised to the lowest grade in the peerage. George Ponsonby asserted that the Crown now held in its pay 110 placemen, and that one-eighth of the gross revenue of the country was divided amongst members of Parliament.

CHAPTER X.

LOCAL RIOTS AND AGRARIAN DISTURBANCES.

A.D. 1784-1790.

MEANWHILE the country was in a very disturbed state, both in the north and in the south. In the north a religious war had broken out between the Protestants and the Roman Catholics. Originating in a quarrel between two Presbyterian peasants, one of whom was joined by a Roman Catholic, the feud grew into a village brawl, which rapidly spread in the surrounding country until the counties of Armagh and Louth were divided into two contending camps. Both parties were composed of the lowest and most brutal of the peasantry. They met and fought, and lives were lost. The Protestants were more numerous and better armed. By law the Roman Catholics were not entitled to possess arms, and the Protestants took upon themselves to make domiciliary visits to their houses to search for arms, in the early hours of the morning, and hence obtained the name of "Peep-o'-day boys." The Roman Catholics associated themselves for self-protection, and went by the name of "Defenders." So serious were the riots

that bodies of volunteers were revived for the purpose of keeping order; but this only made matters worse, as they simply took the side of the Protestant combatants, and occupied themselves in disarming the Defenders: while the Protestant magistracy showed a corresponding partiality. A party of Roman Catholic ruffians retaliated by committing a brutal outrage on an unoffending Protestant schoolmaster, and the feeling of the two parties rapidly grew into one of intense exasperation.

In the south the Whiteboys had again appeared in Munster under the name of "Rightboys;" an invisible Captain Right being the nominal head-centre like Ever Joyce and Captain Dwyer. The disorders were repetitions of what had gone before, and arose from the same causes. Government, instead of removing the mischief which culminated in the agrarian outrages of 1761, crushed out the flames of lawlessness by coercion, and left the disease to grow and spread in silence until a fresh outbreak was inevitable. The condition of the tenantry in Munster was very miserable. The rent of potato ground had risen to £6 an acre, which was paid in labour at the rate of 6d. a day. There was hardly an estate which was not let at a rack-rent, or even above its value. Even Fitzgibbon admitted in the House of Commons that "It was impossible for human wretchedness to exceed that of the miserable tenantry of that province," that "they were ground to powder by relentless landlords," that "they had not food and raiment for themselves, but the landlord grasped the whole," and that "they lived in a more abject state of