Page:A Compendium of Irish Biography.djvu/84

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days with his family at Caen, and then proceeded to Paris to pay his duty to Queen Henrietta Maria. During his ensuing residence in France he was in the greatest straits for money; and he and his family could scarcely have subsisted were it not that the Marchioness was allowed by Cromwell to visit Ireland in 1653, where after two years' negotiations she secured a reversion of a portion of her jointure. We are told that Cromwell "treated her, indeed, always with the greatest civility; never refused her an audience; and when she went away, he always waited on her to her coach or chair." After a short imprisonment in the Tower, her eldest son, the Earl of Ossory, and her second son, Richard, were permitted to retire to Holland; while "she lived at Dunmore, applying herself to tillage and country affairs, and never saw her lord till he came over to England in the June after His Majesty's restoration." Meanwhile, the Marquis was engaged in constant negotiations. In 1657 he risked his life by visiting London in disguise, to consult with the King's friends, and appears then to have discountenanced armed opposition to Cromwell's government, as likely to prove ineffectual. Upon his return to Paris, he lay concealed until April 1658, "almost in as much danger of the Bastile there as he had been of the Tower of London," treaties between France and England having obliged Charles and his adherents to leave France in 1656, and take up their abode in Holland and elsewhere. In 1660 came the Restoration, and Carte concludes his 5th Book with the words: "The King was invited over without any condition, and the Marquis of Ormond, who had attended him in the whole course of his exile, attended him likewise in the latter end of May on his happy return into England." The same author thus opens his 6th Book: "The Marquis of Ormond, after ten year's banishment and a long-continued series of adversity, now found himself in his native country, happy in the favour of his prince, and in the esteem of the world, and dignified with various honours and employments." He was sworn in Privy-Councillor, and made Steward of the Household, and in March 1661 was created a Duke. The Duchess joined him in London; and he saw himself at Court with all his family about him. All was confusion in Irish affairs. It was found impossible to make such easy terms with the Cromwellian adventurers in Ireland, as with the adherents of the Commonwealth in England. On 27th September 1662 the Act of Settlement was passed; and Ormond, as the Lord-Lieutenant, became Referee to the Commissioners of the Court of Claims, instituted for the carrying out of the provisions of the measure. This Act, qualified by the Act of Explanation passed shortly afterwards, created what has been described by Mr. Prendergast as "a counter revolution, by which some of the royalist English of Ireland, and a few of the native Irish, were restored to their estates." By the Act of Explanation, says Smiles, in his History, "which closed the settlement of Ireland, thousands of the most respectable and ancient inhabitants of Ireland were consigned to hopeless ruin and wretchedness: 3,200 claims, the investigation of which Charles had guaranteed according to his own Act of Settlement, were summarily got rid of; and the applicants were stripped of their property, without so much as the form of a trial. Their repeated applications for a hearing of their cause … were pertinaciously refused by the monarch for whom they had sacrificed their all; while the men who had rebelled against his father, and resisted his own authority, were rewarded with at least two-thirds of the best lands in Ireland." The Cromwellians also felt themselves aggrieved; and the Duke found it necessary to suppress more than one of their plots. Several officers were executed in 1663, for a conspiracy, in which Colonel Blood was engaged, to seize the Castle of Dublin; and three years afterwards a mutiny at Carrickfergus was suppressed after considerable bloodshed, by the Duke in person and his son, the Earl of Arran. While Charles was squandering thousands in licentiousness, the army in Ireland was in chronic discontent, from arrears of pay, and want of a proper commissariat, and the Duke was occasionally obliged to smooth matters over by supplying deficiencies out of his private estate. During his temporary absence in London upon business relative to the Act of Explanation, the Earl of Ossory acted as Lord-Deputy. Upon the Duke's return to Dublin, 17th October 1665, he was received in state by the Corporatin and citizens. Along the route from James's-gate to the Castle, emblematic "mysteries" were enacted, and at Cornmarket, we are told, there was a "conduit whence wine ran freely." Some days afterwards, the Act of Explanation, already referred to, was passed by the Irish Parliament. In June 1663, a Bill was brought into the English Parliament to prevent the importation, alive or dead, of Irish sheep or cattle. There had been an importation since the war, of cattle alone, of 61,000 per annum. The Duke vigorously opposed this

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