bosom of their family, sitting at their fireside, fondling on his knee the infant child of one of the victims, whose blood was to drip from the scaffold in Green Street, a few weeks later, through his unequalled infamy. On the 12th July, John and Henry Sheares were brought to trial, and the fiend Armstrong appeared on the witness table and swore away their lives. Two days afterwards the martyr-brothers were executed, side by side. Indeed they fell through the drop hand clasped in hand, having, as they stood blindfolded on the trap, in the brief moment before the bolt was drawn, by an instinct of holy affection strong in death each one reached out as best he could his pinioned hand, and grasped that of his brother! The capture of Lord Edward, so quickly followed by the arrest of the brothers Sheares, was a deathblow to the insurrection, as far as concerned any preconcerted movement. On the night of the appointed, day an abortive rising took place in the neighborhood of the metropolis. On the same day Kildare, Lord Edward's county, took the field, and against hopeless disadvantages made a gallant stand. Meath also kept its troth, as did Down and Antrim in the north keep theirs, but only to a like bloody sacrifice, and in a few days it seemed that all was over. But a county almost free from complicity in the organization, a county in which no one on either side had apprehended the revolt, was now about to show the world what Irish peasants, driven to desperation defending their homes and altars, could dare and do. Wexford, heroic and glorious Wexford, was now about to show that even one county of Ireland's thirty-two could engage more than half the available army of England! Wexford rose, not in obedience to any call from the united Irish organization, but purely and solely from the instinct of self-preservation. Although there was probably no district in Ireland so free from participation in the designs of that association (there were scarcely two hundred enrolled United Irishmen amongst its entire population), all the horrors of free-quarters and martial law had been let loose on the county. Atrocities that sicken the heart in their contemplation, filled with terror the homes of that peaceful and inoffensive people. The midnight skies were reddened with the flames of burning cottages, and the glens resounded with shrieks of agony, vengeance, and despair. Homes desolated, female virtue made the victim of crimes that cannot be named, the gibbet and the triangle erected in every hamlet, and finally, the temples of God desecrated and given to the torch, left manhood in Wexford no choice but that which to its eternal honor it made. Well and bravely Wexford fought that fight. It was the wild rush to arms of a tortured peasantry, unprepared, unorganized, unarmed. Yet no Irishman has need to "hang his head for shame" when men speak of gallant Wexford in ninetyeight. Battle for battle, the men of that county beat the best armies of the king, until their relative forces became out of all proportion. Neither Tell in Switzerland nor Hofer in the Tyrol earned immortality more gloriously than that noble band of the sister-counties," Wexford and WicklowBeauchamp Bagenal Harvey; Colclough of Tintern Abbey ; Fitzgerald of Newpark; Miles Byrne, and Edmund Kyan, in the one; and the patriot brothers Byrne of Ballymanus, with Holt, Hackett, and "brave Michael Dwyer," in the other. And, as he who studies the history of this country will note, in all its struggles for seven hundred years, the priests of Ireland, ever fearless to brave the anger of the maddened people, restraining them while the conflict might be avoided, were ever readiest to die, Whether on the scaffold high, side by side with the people, when driven to the last resort. Fathers John and Michael Murphy, Father Roche, and Father Clinch, are names that should ever be remembered by Irishmen when tempters whisper that the voice of the Catholic pastor, raised in warning or restraint, is the utterance of one who cannot feel for, who would not die for, the flock he desires to save. Just as the short and bloody struggle had terminated, there appeared in Killala Bay the first instalment of that aid from France for which the United Irish leaders had desired to wait! If they could have resisted the government endeavors to precipitate the rising for barely three or four months longer, it is impossible to say how the movement might have resulted. On the 22d August, the French general Humbert, landed at Killala with barely one thousand men. Miserable as was this force, a few months earlier it would have counted for twenty thousand; but now, ten thousand, much less ten hundred, would not avail. They came too late, or the rising was too soon. Nevertheless, with this handful of men, joined by a few thousand hardy Mayo peasantry, Humbert literally chased the government troops before him across the island; and it was not until the viceroy himself, Lord Cornwallis, hurrying from Dublin, concentrated around the Franco-Irish army of three thousand men a force of nearly thirty thousand, enveloping them on all sides-and of course, hopelessly overpowering them—that the victorious march of the daring Frenchmen was arrested by the complete defeat and capitulation of Ballinamuck, on the morning of the 8th September, 1798. It was the last battle of the insurrection. Within a fortnight subsequently two further and smaller expeditions from France reached the northern coast; one accompanied by Napper Tandy (an exiled United Irish leader), and another under Admiral Bompart with Wolfe Tone on board. The latter one was attacked by a powerful English fleet and captured. Tone, the heroic and indefatigable, was sent in irons to Dublin, where he was tried by court-martial and sentenced to be hung. He pleaded hard for a soldier's death; but his judges were inexorable. It turned out, however, that his trial and conviction were utterly illegal, as martial law had ceased, and the ordinary tribunals were sitting at the time. At the instance of the illustrious Irish advocate, orator, and patriot, Curran, an order was obtained against the military authorities to deliver Tone over to the civil court. The order was at first resisted, but ultimately the official of the court was informed that the prisoner" had committed suicide." He died a few days after of a wound in his throat, possibly inflict ed by himself, to avert the indignity he so earnestly deprecated; but not improbably, as popular conviction has it, the work of a murderous hand; for fouler deeds were done in the government dungeons in "those dark and evil days." The insurrection of '98 was the first rebellion on the part of the Irish people for hundreds of years. The revolt of the Puritan colonists in 1641, and that of their descendants, the Protestant rebels of 1690, were not Irish movements in any sense of the phrase. It was only after 1605 that the English government could, by any code of moral obligations whatever, be held entitled to the obedience of the Irish people, whose struggles previous to that date were lawful efforts in defence of their native and legitimate rulers against the English invaders. And never, subsequently to 1605, up to the period at which we have now arrived-1798-did the Irish people revolt or rebel against the new sovereignty. On the contrary, in 1641, they fought for the king, and lost heavily by their loyalty. In 1690 once more they fought for the king, and again they paid a terrible penalty for their fidelity to the sovereign. In plain truth, the Irish are, of all people, the most disposed to respect constituted authority where it is entitled to respect, and the most ready to repay even the shortest measure of justice on the part of the sovereign, by generous, faithful, enduring, and self-sacrificing loyalty. They are a law-abiding people-or rather a justice-loving people; for their contempt for law becomes extreme when it is made the antithesis of justice. Nothing but terrible provocation could have driven such a people into rebellion. Rebellion against just and lawful government is a great crime. Rebellion against constituted government of any character is a terrible responsibility. There are circumstances under which resistance is a duty, and where, it may be said, the crime would be rather in slavish or cowardly acquiescence; but awful is the accountability of him who undertakes to judge that the measure of justification is full, that the moral duty of resistance is established by the circumstances, and that, nor merely in figure of speech, but in solemn reality, no other resort remains. But, however all this may be, the public code of which it. is a part, rightly recognizes a great distinction in favor of a people who are driven into the field to defend their homes and altars against brutal military violence. Such were the heroic men of Wexford; and of the United Irishmen it is to be remembered that if they pursued an object unquestionably good and virtuous in itself, outside, not within, the constitution, it was not by their own choice. They were no apostles of anarchy, no lovers of revolution, no "rebels for a theory." They were not men who decried or opposed the more peaceful action of moral force agencies. They would have preferred them, had a choice fairly been left them. There was undoubtedly a French Jacobinical spirit tingeing the views of many of the Dublin and Ulster leaders towards the close, but under all the circumstances this was inevitable. With scarcely an ex. ception, they were men of exemplary moral characters, high social position, of unsullied integrity, of brilliant intellect, of pure and lofty patriotism. They were men who honestly desired and endeavored, while it was permitted to them so to do, by lawful and constitutional means, to save and serve their country, but who, by an infamous conspiracy of the government, were deliberately forced upon resistance as a patriot's duty, and who at the last sealed with their blood their devotion to Ireland. "More than twenty years have passed away," says Lord Holland; "many of my political opinions are softened, my predilections for some men weakened, my prejudices against others removed; but my approbation of Lord Edward Fitzgerald's actions remains unaltered and unshaken. His country was bleeding under one of the hardest tyrannies that our times have witnessed. He who thinks that a man can be even excused in such circumstances by any other consideration than that of despair from opposing by force a pretended government, seems to me to sanction a principle which would insure impunity to the greatest of all human delinquents, or at least to those who produce the greatest misery among mankind." * * Lord Holland's Memoirs of the Whig Party. |