The American upheaval was itself preceded by a rebellion amongst the Ulster Protestants. A close connection can be traced between the failure of the one outbreak and the success of the other. In July, 1770—only eighty years after the Battle of the Boyne—the offspring of the Planters in the Counties of Antrim, Down, Derry, and Tyrone rose in arms. British writers like J. A. Froude and John Wesley, Irish historians like Lecky and Benn, agree as to the responsibility of the landlords who provoked the insurrection. Froude links together as cause and effect the atrocities of the Marquis of Donegall and the loss of the American Colonies. He says:—“Sir Arthur Chichester, the great Viceroy of Ireland under James I., was, of all Englishmen who ever settled in the country, the most useful to it. His descendant, the Lord Donegall, of whom it has become necessary to speak, was perhaps the person who inflicted the greatest injury to it. Sir Arthur had been rewarded for his services by vast estates in the County Antrim. The fifth Earl and first Marquis of Donegall, already by the growth of Belfast and the fruit of other men’s labours, while he was sitting still, enormously rich, found his income still unequal to his yet more enormous expenditure. His name is looked for in vain among the nobles who, in return for high places, were found in the active service of their country. He was one of those habitual and splendid absentees who discharged his duties to the God who made him by magnificently doing as he would with his own. Many of his Antrim leases having fallen in simultaneously he demanded £100,000 in fines for the renewal of them. The tenants, all Protestants, offered the interest of the money in addition to the rent. It could not be. Speculative Belfast capitalists paid the fine and took the lands over the heads of the tenants to sub-let. “Mr. Clotworthy Upton, another great Antrim proprietor, imitated the example, and at once the whole countryside were driven from their habitations. Sturdy Scots, who in five generations had reclaimed Antrim from the wilderness, saw the farms, which they and their fathers had made valuable, let by auction to the highest bidder; and, when they refused to submit themselves to robbery, saw them let to others, and let in many instances to Catholics, who would promise anything to recover their hold on the soil. “The most substantial of the expelled tenantry gathered their effects together and sailed to join their countrymen in the New World, where the Scotch-Irish became known as the most bitter of the Secessionists.” Mr. Froude traces to these evictions the uprise of the “Peep of Day” and the “Hearts of Steel” conspiracies, and adds:—