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Whereby he merely enraged the Scots and disgusted Argyle. However, a short time afterwards, Shan raided Tyrconnel's country, and carried off the chief and his wife; who seems to have been fascinated by her captor, and willingly became his consort, irregular as the conditions were.
A letter was written for him to Sir William Lemon, to prevail upon him to interpose his good offices with Lord Tyrconnel, in which he solicited Sir William's assistance "for a man who really needed it as much as any man could well do;" and informed him that he was retiring "for ever to a place where he should no more trouble his relations, friends, or enemies;" he confessed that his passion had betrayed him to some conduct, with regard to Lord Tyrconnel, for which he could not but heartily ask his pardon; and as he imagined Lord Tyrconnel's passion might be yet so high, that he would not "receive a letter from him," begged that Sir William would endeavour to soften him; and expressed his hopes that he would comply with this request, and that "so small a relation would not harden his heart against him."
To the Queen Tyrconnel was personally an object of aversion. Powis was therefore suggested as the man best qualified for the viceroyalty. He was of illustrious birth: he was a sincere Roman Catholic: and yet he was generally allowed by candid Protestants to be an honest man and a good Englishman. All opposition, however, yielded to Tyrconnel's energy and cunning.
His abilities, however, were not contemptible; and, under a good King, he would probably have been a respectable viceroy. About three quarters of a year elapsed between the recall of Ormond and the arrival of Clarendon at Dublin. During that interval the King was represented by a board of Lords Justices: but the military administration was in Tyrconnel's hands.
He had recently attempted to convince the King that Tyrconnel's scheme of confiscating the property of the English colonists in Ireland was full of danger, and had, with the help of Powis and Bellasyse, so far succeeded that the execution of the design had been postponed for another year. But this timidity and scrupulosity had excited disgust and suspicion in the royal mind.
Not ten pounds of powder, not twenty firelocks fit for use, could be collected within the walls. Messengers were sent with pressing letters to summon the Protestant gentry of the vicinage to the rescue; and the summons was gallantly obeyed. In a few hours two hundred foot and a hundred and fifty horse had assembled. Tyrconnel's soldiers were already at hand.
I followed Frances and Tyrconnel back to the palace, and when they parted at the King's Street Gate, he asked me to go with him to the sign of the King's Head and have a tankard of mulled sack and a breast of Welsh mutton right off the spit. Tyrconnel's speech was made up of an amusing lisp grafted on the broadest Irish brogue ever heard outside of Killarney.
"These proposals," says the Chevalier Wogan, Tyrconnel's nephew and confidant, who is our informant, "though they were to have had an English Act of Parliament for their sanction, were refused with universal contempt." In other words, the party which with the assistance of France still hoped to obtain all, refused to be content with half.
He very justly observed, that the style was too supplicatory, and the representation too abject, and that he ought at least to have made him complain with "the dignity of a gentleman in distress." He declared that he would not write the paragraph in which he was to ask Lord Tyrconnel's pardon; for, "he despised his pardon, and therefore could not heartily, and would not hypocritically, ask it."
Possibly some hungry ATTACHE of Milord Tyrconnel's Legation; fatally shut out from the beatitudes of this barbarous Court, and willing to seek solacement, and turn a dishonest penny, in the PER-CONTRA course?
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