The fire, smouldering everywhere, burst into a flame in Armagh, a Protestant district into which Catholics had intruded by outbidding Protestant holders of farms whose leases had expired. The Protestants, banding together under the name of Peep o'Day Boys, proceeded to oust the intruders, burning some of their houses. The Catholics combined for mutual protection under the name of Defenders. Outrages were committed on both sides. In a pitched battle, on a small scale, called the battle of the Diamond, the Catholics were worsted and a number of them were killed. Many Catholics were driven from their homes, and the fugitives spread through the country the belief that the Protestants were bent on extermination. The United Irishmen, disciples of Tom Paine, cared nothing for the quarrels of sects. But disaffection of any kind was grist to their revolutionary mill. They coalesced with Defenderism, and by superior intelligence got control of the movement, which they organized as an expectant army of revolution. Their task was made easy by the habits of conspiracy formed among the peasantry in the agrarian war. There were secret oaths, passwords, military gradations of command. There were even reviews under pretence of digging the potatoes of patriots who were in prison. Everything was ready for a rising as soon as French succour should appear. All the blacksmiths were making pike-heads, the young trees were being everywhere cut down for the shafts. Muskets in plenty would come with the auxiliary army from France. Wolfe Tone had visited Paris, of which in its revolutionary phase he gives a lively picture, and received a promise of aid; Hoche, with whom he had an interview, being eager for the enterprise. Among the people generally the rebellion was agrarian rather than religious, religious only as the Catholic peasantry believed that they saw in Protestantism a badge of general enmity. But that belief made the war between the sects internecine. It does not appear that any but a few of the lowest and coarsest of the priesthood took an active part in the rebellion. The order, as a whole, could hardly look with pleasure for the conquest of Ireland by an atheist revolution. The French, in fact, had they become masters of Ireland for a time, would probably in the end have found themselves there, as in Spain, confronted by a hostile priesthood carrying with it the people.