“To an Irishman,” writes Mr. O’Connor, “then a youth, living in the country house of his fathers, and deeply immersed in the small concerns of a squire’s daily life, the execution of the Manchester martyrs was a new birth of political convictions. To him, brooding from his early days over the history of his country, this catastrophe came to crystallise impressions into conviction, and to pave the way from dreams to action. It was the execution of Allen, Larkin, and O’Brien that gave Mr. Parnell to the service of Ireland.”[263] But another event happened which made it clear that the Fenian conspiracy was still formidable. One of its leaders, an Irish-American officer named Burke, had been captured and cast into Clerkenwell gaol, and his friends resolved to rescue him. Their agents, on the 13th of December, placed a barrel of gunpowder opposite the exercising ground of the gaol, where General Burke was supposed to be walking at the time. They then blew down the wall. Fortunately for himself, the Government had learned that a rescue was to be attempted, and the General had accordingly been removed to another part of the prison, otherwise he would have been killed. The victims were poor people who lived in the houses opposite the gaol, of whom twelve were killed and one hundred and twenty shockingly injured. An ignorant Fenian named Barrett was convicted of having been implicated in this clumsy plot, and was tried and executed in front of Newgate. This outrage ruined the Fenian organisation, not only in England but in Ireland. Many honest Irishmen, who in a fit of patriotic enthusiasm had joined its ranks, withdrew from a body whose deep and dark designs they saw were apt to be carried out with the stupid brutality that marked the Clerkenwell outrage. [Illustration: THE QUEEN LAYING THE FOUNDATION STONE OF THE ROYAL ALBERT HALL. (_See p. 292._)]