Probably no Irishman who ever lived was a more bitter and uncompromising enemy of English rule in Ireland than John Mitchel, the rebel of 1848. His opinion, therefore, is worth having as to the character of Chesterfield's rule in Dublin Castle. In his "History of Ireland," a book which might well be more often read in this country than it is, Mitchel says of Chesterfield: "Having satisfied himself that there was no insurrectionary movement in the country, and none likely to be, he was not to be moved from his tolerant courses by any complaints or remonstrances. Far from yielding to the feigned alarm of those who solicited him to raise new regiments, he sent four battalions of the soldiers then in Ireland to reinforce the Duke of Cumberland. He discouraged jobs, kept down expenses. . . . When some savage Ascendency Protestant would come to him with tales of alarm, he usually 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]