Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846Various
History
Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
The result of his lordship's government may be easily told. His personal
favours to the Papists were received in the usual style of instalments;
while the Protestant corporation stood aloof, and drank with renewed
potations "the glorious and immortal memory of William III." Such is the
dignity of politics in Irish deliberations. At length the unlucky
conciliator had his eyes opened by the nature of things, and was
compelled to apply to parliament for the insurrection act. The
Attorney-general Plunket, the ablest advocate of the Papists, was
compelled, by a similar necessity, to write a long official letter, in
which he stated--"That he feared in five or six counties, great numbers
indeed of the lower classes had been involved in the conspiracy; some of
them from a love of enterprise and ready disposition for mischief; some
of them on a principle of counteraction to associations of an opposite
description; but most of them, he should hope, from terror on the one
hand, and the _expectation of impunity_ on the other." There was the
point, which no man comprehended better in theory than this clever
law-officer, and none better in practice than the Popish peasant. "This
_expectation_, however," he observes, "must now be effectually removed,
and the terror of the law, I trust, be substituted in place of the
terror of the conspirators." Adding, "your Excellency will observe with
regret, that the association has been founded on a principle of
_religious exclusion!_"
Such had been the fruit of concession. The opposite plan, so often
suggested, and so essentially necessary, was then tried; and its fruits
too followed. Almost the whole of Ireland became instantly
tranquillized; men were no longer murdered in open day; cattle no longer
maimed; houses no longer burned. The Marquess thus writes the English
government:--"During the summer and autumn of 1822, the measures
sanctioned by Parliament for the restoration of tranquillity, combined
with other causes, have produced such a degree of quiet, that no
necessity existed for my _usual_ communications."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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