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The "Moonlighters" of 1888 lineally represent, if they do not simply reproduce, the "Whiteboys" of 1760; and the domination of the "uncrowned king" constantly reminds one of Froude's vivid and vigorous sketch of the sway wielded by "Captain Dwyer" and "Joanna Maskell" from Mallow to Westmeath, between the years 1762 and 1765.
I have said, in a former chapter of my biography, that the kingdom of Ireland was at this period ravaged by various parties of banditti; who, under the name of Whiteboys, Oakboys, Steelboys, with captains at their head, killed proctors, fired stacks, houghed and maimed cattle, and took the law into their own hands.
The crime was discovered, and the wretched woman sentenced to be hanged, along with the usual dockful of sheep-stealers, Whiteboys, shop-lifters, and cattle-houghers, who, to the amount of seven or eight at a time, were invariably 'turned off' within four-and-twenty hours after their sentences at each assizes.
He had taken a great dislike to Andy Neil and to some other tenants of his class; he had been roused to stronger feeling by their open resistance, and had declared that not all the Land Leagues in Ireland, not all the Fenians, not all the Whiteboys, were they banded together in one great insurrection, should frighten him from his purpose.
'That they would; and if it were a purse of gold they 'd have done the same, cried Kate. 'Won't you say that they'd shoot you for half a crown, though? said Kearney, 'and that the worst "Whiteboys" of Ireland come out of the same village? 'I do like a people so unlike all the rest of the world, cried Nina; 'whose motives none can guess at, none forecast. I'll go there to-morrow.
A fixed resolution to avoid the very appearance of digression in these annals prevents my referring to various sporadic Irish combinations of the 18th century Whiteboys, Steelboys, Oakboys, Peep-o'-day Boys, Defenders some Catholic, some Protestant, some mixed; but each representing an inarticulate protest against agrarian or ecclesiastical aggression.
It was hemmed in on every side by the obstinate unyielding pressure of selfish interests: the interest of the Established Church against the Presbyterians; the interest of the Protestant laity, or tithe-payers, against the clergy; the bold unscrupulous interest of a landlords' Parliament against the occupier of the soil; which, together with the grievance of the system of tithe-proctors, established in Ireland through the Whiteboys the fatal alliance between resistance to wrong and resistance to law, and supplied there the yet more disastrous facility of sustaining and enforcing wrong under the name of giving support to public tranquillity.
The Whiteboys 'found in their favour already existing a general and settled hatred of the law among the great body of the peasantry. We have seen how much the law, and the ministers of the law, had done to deserve the peasant's love.
In the eighties he would have been shot in the back by some scoundrel who had primed himself with Dutch courage from adulterated whisky. He raised a Yeomanry Corps at the time of the Whiteboys to guard the country against these lawless bands, and against the dreaded French invasion. This regiment was called the Dingle Yeomanry, and the tales about it are many.
Outside Parliament, meanwhile, the country was in a very disturbed state. Long before this local riots and disturbances had broken out, especially in the south. As early as 1762, secret societies, known under the generic name of Whiteboys, had inspired terror throughout Munster, especially in the counties of Cork, Limerick, and Tipperary. These risings, as has been clearly proved by Mr.
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