Under these circumstances, while matters appeared not only to take a turn opposed to the duke's political designs, but even to menace his claim to the succession, the king opportunely died under circumstances impossible to be perused without some strong impressions of foul play. The duke was under a growing disfavour, and the earl of Rochester was on the point of being sent to the Tower, on a charge of official malversation in the treasury; and " a message was sent to Mr May, then at Windsor, to desire him to come to court that day, which it was expected would turn out a very critical day. And it proved to be so indeed, though in a different way."* The king was taken suddenly ill after taking " a porringer of spoon meat," which was made "too strong for his stomach," after which he had an unquiet night. The next day he was attended by Dr King, a chemist whom he had sent for concerning some chemical operations, upon which he was at the time engaged. When the doctor came, he was unable to understand the king, whose language was become suddenly so broken and incoherent as to be unintelligible. The doctor went out and reported this unusual circumstance to lord Peterborough, who desired him to return to the king: but he had hardly entered the chamber when the king fell down in a fit, which, for the moment, was judged to be apoplectic. The doctor then bled him, and he regained his senses; but still appeared so oppressed and stupified, that a return of the same attack was expected hourly. It was proposed to administer the sacrament to him, and he was addressed by Sancroft and Kenn, who, considering the real emergency of the occasion, spoke strongly to him of his sinful life: the king was meanwhile exhibiting in the presence of these reverend prelates a singular illustration of the life he had led, and of his awful unfitness to meet so sudden a call; for he was supported in the bed on which he sat by his mistress the duchess of Portsmouth. He was pressed to receive the sacrament, but resisted all entreaty till the duke of York sent for Huddleston, a favourite priest of his own persuasion: when this person had all things prepared for the purpose, every one was desired to leave the room but the earl of Bath and Feversham, when the sacrament according to the ritual of the Romish communion was administered with extreme difficulty, as the king was unable to swallow the wafer. After which, the company being re-admitted, the king "went through the agonies of death" very decently, according to Burnet: now and then complaining of being burned up within, but still commanding his sufferings enough to deliver his last injunctions to the duke, in favour of his favourite mistresses Portsmouth, and Nell Gwyn; and to give his blessing to those present, who fell on their knees to receive it, which seems to have been carrying the farce of court obsequiousness as far as can well be conceived. And thus king Charles II. died. In addition to the slight incidents which give a suspicious character to these circumstances, one far more unequivocal remains to be told. Poison was suspected by some of the physicians: and when the body was examined, great care was taken to divert the attention of the medical men present, from the stomach, which was not suffered to be examined; but while means were taken to divert and

Burnet's Own Time.

interrupt the spectators' attention, it was suddenly put out of the way; but not before doctors Lower and Needham observed "two or three blue spots on the outside," from which their inference was evidently of an unfavourable nature. 66 Needham," says Burnet, "called twice to have it opened," but the operators pretended not to hear; and he heard a murmur amongst them when he repeated the call. Le Fevre, a French doctor, observed a blackness on the shoulder; and Short, whose creed encouraged him to speak his suspicions more freely, "did very much suspect foul dealing," and was soon after taken ill after drinking a large dose of wormwood wine given him by a patient, and died, expressing his opinion to the physicians who attended him, that he was poisoned for having spoken too freely of the king's death! These incidents may easily be overrated; yet it is not to be neglected that they are reported upon the authority of those who were least likely to be deceived; and whose inferences were the most likely to be grounded on a just appreciation of the actual circumstances. After having composed his history, Burnet received a very curious account from a Mr Henly, of Hampshire, of a conversation this gentleman had with the duchess of Portsmouth, who expressed herself as if she thought the king had been poisoned; and on being further pressed, she mentioned that she had always pressed his majesty to set himself at ease with his people, by coming to an agreement with his parliament; that he had made up his mind to follow this advice, and as a needful preliminary, resolved to send away the duke. These purposes were to have been carried into effect the day following that on which he was taken ill. She having been aware of these particulars beforehand, mentioned them (with an injunction of secrecy perhaps,) to her confessor: it was her impression that this person mentioned them to others, and that they thus went round through the parties most interested to prevent the king's designs by any means. This account, it must be observed, seems to coincide with the facts, so far as they are known, and account as well for the sudden interruption above mentioned in the Irish arrangements as far as the king's sudden death.

The licentious profligate, whose prudence, when fairly alarmed, might have led him to recall his steps and retrieve the fortunes of his race, was succeeded by his shallow and bigoted brother on the throne. Sincere and earnest in the principles he would have maintained, inflated with a false notion of the power and rights of kings, incapable of any sense of public rights, or not conceiving the real force and character of public opinion and national feeling, he tampered with these dangerous elements with a feeble and inadvertent hand, until they exploded, to the destruction of his house, and the subversion of the infirm and tottering pillars on which it stood.

Among his first acts was the reparation of that broken tissue of fraud and despotism, by which he had fondly hoped to effect his favourite purpose. The recall of the duke of Ormonde was confirmed with circumstances of gratuitous harshness; and having publicly avowed his adherence to the church of Rome, he prepared to pave the way for the restoration of the papal dominion in England by the completion of its triumphs in Ireland. The mere report of his favour went before his acts, and heaped fresh fuel in Ireland upon the flames of party

contention and fear. The Irish papists were naturally eager to avail themselves to the fullest extent, of a revolution which appeared to be working in their favour. The notions of the day with regard to civil rights were crude, loose, and unsettled. The various territorial arrangements which had been taking place since the great rebellion, by which lands and claims had appeared to be shifted by arbitrary awards and decisions with a meteoric uncertainty, had tended to this effect, as well as the continued interpositions of government, by stretches of prerogative and special enactment, rather than by ascertained ordinances and jurisdictions. With the understood sanction of the king, sudden impulses of popular feeling became more violent in the effects which they produced: the party animosity or alarm, as well as the ambition and cupidity of turbulent and designing partisans, were at once in arms, and all who looked for any advantage rushed with characteristic impetuosity to their object. The papists were animated not simply by the desire of obtaining political ascendancy -they were also governed by an ardent thirst for revenge: nor, considering human nature, do we consider the statement to their prejudice; for they were only obliged to look on the policy of which they had been the subjects, according to the principles they held; and if we abstract that stern and stringent policy from its own most imperative reasons, it could not fail to be regarded as oppressive. The time was now seemingly at hand for the assertion of their civil and ecclesiastical principles, and for seizing upon the ascendancy, which every party will not fail to usurp when the occasion offers. The restoration of the forfeited lands was expected to follow that of a communion, which the fondness of popular credulity now conceived to be the ancient faith of the land; and this expectation gave its usual excitement to the eagerness of the fresh impulse then communicated. The proceedings of council and their enactments appeared tardy to the popular zeal, and the departure of the duke of Ormonde to Dublin was the signal for a universal influx of the party, thus roused into life and hope. The alarm thus excited was increased by the selection of officers appointed by the English council. They were, it is true, protestants; for the king was checked at every stage of his rash course by the advice of persons more cautious than he; but they were generally supposed to be selected for dispositions likely to promote the royal aims: Boyle (until tried) was supposed to have a leaning to popery, and Granard being the zealous patron of the presbyterians, would thus, it was presumed, be not unlikely to lead to a division of the hostile camp. These impressions were indeed, as we have already noticed, soon found to be erroneous.

The rebellion of Monmouth, quickly suppressed, gave the king a pretext of which he gladly availed himself, to accelerate his operations. The Irish militia, embodied by the duke of Ormonde and composed of protestants, was by his orders disarmed, and the measure was rendered specious by rumours of a protestant insurrection, for which there was much cause, but no disposition. It was immediately after this act that Talbot was raised to the peerage by the king, and the act was approved by the loud applause of his party. The clergy of the church of Rome addressed the king, to petition that he would send over

the earl as lord-lieutenant, with plenary power to restore them to their rights and functions; but the king or his advisers felt that such a step would yet be precipitate: there was danger in suffering the too rapid advance of his policy in Ireland to expose its real design in England, where some degree of caution was, even by the infatuated king, felt to be necessary. The character of Talbot was rash and unmoderated by judgment. On this account it was judged safer to steer a middle course, and the earl of Clarendon was sent over. His near connexion with the king, and his zealous profession of loyal principles, together with his ignorance of Ireland, recommended him as a safe person to quiet suspicions and allay the disturbances, which, having been raised by intemperate eagerness, might lead to premature results. Clarendon began by congratulating himself in his public speech to the council on the quiet state of the country. He was ere long undeceived: the dis arming of the militia had been productive of disorders unknown for many previous years in Ireland; the bands of plundering bonaghts which they had kept down, soon overspread the country with murders and robberies, and it was found necessary to restore, to a considerable extent, the arms which had been taken from the protestants.

The appointment of Clarendon was nothing more than the masque devised to cover the approaches of the grand attack-to quiet alarm and baffle the observation of England, which was now looking on these transactions with jealousy; but the zeal of James was too earnest for the slow and temporising methods which prudence would have demanded. A more long-sighted and dexterous politician would have shunned the precipitate course, which, producing its effects without mature preparation, is sure to terminate in a dangerous reaction. Hə would have known that no state of things is so perfect, that it may not be speciously undermined under the pretext of remedying its evils and repairing its defects; and that the measures by which these useful ends may be seemingly approached, are but instruments to be used according to the will of those who devise and govern their operation. A well feigned zeal for the protestant constitution of the kingdom, might easily have been reconciled with the demonstrations of a just and humane regard for the civil prosperity of their brethren of the Romish communion; and while by slow and cautious forbearance, the fears of the country and the discontents and jealousies which were gradually fermenting into an organized existence, might have been dissipated; the political forces of the nation, and the moral prepossessions which are sure to follow their direction, might have been worked round in the course of a few years, to a point at which resistance would be ineffectual, and the power attained well and widely rooted, and have sent out its fibres wide and deep through every institution and source of civil life. But neither James, nor the zealots by whom he was secretly impelled, nor the Irish party who were to be the vanguard of the struggle he was about to commence, had the patience for political manoeuvring. The pliancy of Clarendon was to be associated with the fierce and unscrupulous resolution of Talbot, who was created earl of Tyrconnel, and sent over as lieutenant-general of the Irish army, and invested with all the powers over that efficient branch of the Irish administration, which had till then been an essential power

of the lord-lieutenant. Talbot was, as King remarks, 66 a person more hated than any other man by the protestants," he had been named by Oates as the person destined for the very employment now committed to his hands, and the remark circulated, that if "Oates was an ill evidence, he was certainly a good prophet." Tyrconnel entered upon his new office with ferocious alertness, while his first care was to new-organize the army; for this purpose he omitted no means, and suffered no sense of humanity or regard for the claims of right or honour to stand in his way. His sudden and violent steps were aggravated by insolence, and debased by dissimulation. "In the morning he would take an officer into his closet, and with all the oaths, curses, and damnations which were never wanting to him, he would profess friendship and kindness for him, and promise him the continuance of his commission, and yet in the afternoon cashier him with all the contempt he could heap upon him. Nay, perhaps, while he was then caressing him, he had actually given away his commission." From the same historian we learn, "as for the soldiers and troopers, his way with them was to march them from their usual quarters to some distant place where he thought they were least known, where they would be put to the greatest hardships, and then he stripped them, &c., &c."+ Thus turned out of employment, and stripped, these unfortunate men had to return home in the condition of paupers across the country. This was but a small portion of the evil inflicted by the same act. The soldiers by whom these were replaced, were selected for a purpose, and governed by impressions little favourable to any end but the insolence and disorder into which they launched at once. Raised for the understood purpose of aggression, they did their worst to exceed the purposes of their employer. Tyrconnel's orders, as the orders of the worst administration will commonly be, were couched so as to present the sound at least of civil right; it was simply ordered that all classes of his majesty's subjects should be allowed to serve in the army. Tyrconnel better understood the spirit of his employer, and went straightway to his end. He gave open and peremptory directions, that none should be admitted but members of the Church of Rome.

The consequences of this innovation were some of them immediate and deplorable. The change thus violently effected was not more remarkable for the ruinous and inhuman dismissal of the existing

corps of the army, than for the indiscriminate admission, in their place, of the most unqualified and the most vile. Tyrconnel, whose object it was to carry his purposes with the rough and strong hand of violence, and to ruin as well as to depress, had no scruple in the adaptation of his instruments to his ends. The dregs and offscourings of society, robbers and adventurers, poured into his ranks, and incapable of discipline, continued to pursue their lawless vocations under the countenance of authority. Of their general conduct, King gives the following account:-"The new-raised forces and officers, being put into arms and command to which they were strangers, into good cloathes, and mounted on horses for which others had paid, behaved themselves with all the insolence common to such sort of men when unworthily