After each interview with his victims Armstrong, according to his own evidence, “returned to the camp and communicated the business that passed to Colonel L’Estrange and Captain Clibborn.” Sometimes he communicated it to Lord Castlereagh and Mr. Cooke. It was Lord Castlereagh who persuaded him to go to the house of the Sheareses. “He would not,” he told Dr. Madden himself, “have gone there if he had not been thus urged to do so. It was wrong, he believed—indeed, he felt it was wrong to have gone there and to have dined with them. _It was the only part of the business he had any reason to regret._” * * * * * Early in the morning of Monday, May 21st, the day following the pleasant dinner-party at which Armstrong had been so hospitably entertained, the inhabitants of Baggot and Pembroke Streets, and the neighbouring Squares, were startled by seeing a party of military take possession of the front and rear entries to the house of Mr. Henry Sheares. A loud rapping at the door roused the inmates, and procured for the police magistrate in charge of the party, Alderman Alexander, and the Chief Constable, Mr. Atkinson, the entrance they demanded “in the king’s name.” Alexander made his way to the library, where he was presently joined by Mr. Henry Sheares. The master of the house was immediately made cognisant of the object of this early visit, and informed that his papers must be searched. Henry Sheares, who was perfectly easy in mind as to this, in the consciousness of having no treasonable papers in his possession, acquiesced without protest. The search was nearly ended, without anything incriminating having been found, when Henry Sheares directed the Alderman’s attention to a small writing box, belonging to his brother, which lay unlocked on the study table. In this box was found a scrawled production, all blots and erasures, which John Sheares, who had the dramatic temperament developed in the highest possible degree, had passed the time in writing, after the rest of the household had gone to bed the previous night. It was written in the character of one addressing the Irish people after a successful rising, and on its evidence, supported by the perjured “parole” of Armstrong, not only John Sheares who wrote it, but Henry, who was asleep when it was written, and as innocent of its contents as his little child, whom Armstrong had fondled the evening before, were launched into eternity. “Can such things be, and not awaken the vengeance of an eternal God?”