The Catholic World, Vol. 22, October, 1875, to March, 1876: A Monthly Magazine of General Literature and ScienceVarious
Religion
The Catholic World, Vol. 22, October, 1875, to March, 1876: A Monthly Magazine of General Literature and Science
Various
Catholic Church -- Periodicals
“If this lord,” says Walpole, “who led a very martial life, had not
taken the pains to record his own actions (which, however, he has done
with great frankness and ingenuity), we should know little of his
story, our historians scarce mentioning him, and even our writers of
anecdotes, as Burnet, or of tales and circumstances, as Roger North,
not giving any account of a court quarrel occasioned by his lordship’s
_Memoirs_. Anthony Wood alone has preserved this event, but has not
made it intelligible. … The earl had been much censured for his share
in the Irish Rebellion, and wrote the _Memoirs_ to explain his conduct
rather than to excuse it; for he freely confesses his faults, and imputes
them to provocations from the government of that kingdom, to whose
rashness and cruelty, conjointly with the votes and resolutions of the
English Parliament, he ascribes the massacre. There are no dates nor
method, and less style, in these _Memoirs_--defects atoned for in some
measure by a martial honesty. Soon after their publication the Earl of
Anglesey wrote to ask a copy. Lord Castlehaven sent him one, but denying
the work as his. Anglesey, who had been a commissioner in Ireland for
the Parliament, published Castlehaven’s letter, with observations and
reflections very abusive of the Duke of Ormond, which occasioned first
a printed controversy, and this a trial before the Privy Council; the
event of which was that Anglesey’s first letter was voted a scandalous
libel, and himself removed from the custody of the Privy Seal; and that
the Earl of Castlehaven’s _Memoirs_, on which he was several times
examined, and which he owned, was declared a scandalous libel on the
government--a censure that seems very little founded; there is not a word
that can authorize that sentence from the Council of Charles II. but
the imputation on the lords-justices of Charles I.; for I suppose the
Privy Council did not pique themselves on vindicating the honor of the
republican Parliament! Bishop Morley wrote _A True Account of the Whole
Proceeding between James, Duke of Ormond, and Arthur, Earl of Anglesey_.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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