"The facts I have mentioned and many more about Aylward are on record in Scotland Yard, and in the Colonial Office, and I am anxious you should know the truth and not attribute too much of the blame in this sad business to the unfortunate, misguided Boers, the victims of his bad advice, still less to any fault of Colonel Lanyon's administration." Sir Bartle was right in his conjecture, for Aylward had joined the insurgents and was one of the acknowledged leaders of Joubert's staff. Major-General Hope Crealock, in a letter to Sir Bartle, wrote (January 7, 1881): "A young Irishman named S----, who knew Aylward in Natal, and who was under my command in the Natal Pioneers, called on me to-night and told me Aylward formerly used to boast of being a Fenian, and vowed he would pay the English Government off for what he had got, by raising the Boers whenever Ireland was rising; and within the last few days has written to him saying he gloried in being one of the instigators of the present Boer revolt, &c., &c. He wrote from Utrecht...." It will be seen from these quotations that our relations with the Transvaal, hostile as they may have been, were scarcely true relations--that the real enmity and rancour, the blood-spilling and wretchedness that commenced at this period, and are at the moment of writing still continuing, were due, firstly, to party spirit in Great Britain, and secondly, to the machinations of adventurers, who, having no status elsewhere, put the ignorance of a race of farmers to their own vile uses. To return to the events of the last chapter. When Sir Owen Lanyon heard of the misfortune that had befallen Colonel Anstruther's troops, he issued a proclamation placing the country under martial law, and Sir George Colley, dreading the results of bad blood raised between Boers and British soldiers by the affair at Bronker's Spruit, caused the following general order to be published:-- "HEADQUARTERS, PIETERMARITZBURG, _December 28th, 1880_.