THE TREATY OF LIMERICK. 81 in his hand, requested, on behalf of the Irish Roman Catholics, to be heard. It must have been a very remarkable scene. Whether we consider the assembly to which the remonstrance was addressed, or the character and condition of the body on whose behalf it was spoken, whose leading nobles, and they were then numerous, stood beside their advocate at the bar of the House, we can not but feel our minds impressed with a vivid image of a most imposing, and in some particulars a very moving spectacle. : The first advocate of his time, who was himself a principal party in the cause which he came to plead, stood before a Protestant House of Commons; while below the bar were assembled about their counsel the heads of the Roman Catholic aristocracy. The latter constituted a much more extensive and differently-constituted class of men from those by whom they have been succeeded. They had been born to wealth and honor they had been induced, by a sentiment of chivalrous devotion, to attach themselves to the fortunes of an unhappy prince. The source of their calamities was in a lofty sentiment. Almost all of them had been soldiers; scarce a man of them but had carried harness on his back. They were actuated by the high and gallant spirit which belongs to the profession of arms. On the banks of the Boyne, on the hill of Aughrim, and at the gates of Limerick, they had given evidences of valor, which, although unavailing, were not the less heroic. They had been worsted, indeed; but they had not been subdued: they had been accustomed to consider their privileges as secured by a great compact, and in substituting the honor of England for the bastions of Limerick, they looked upon their liberties as protected by still more impregnable muniments. It is easy to imagine the dismay, the indignation, and the anguish, with which these gentlemen must have seen a statute in rapid progress through the legislature, which would not only have the effect of violating the treaty of Limerick, and reduce. them to a state of utter servitude, but, by holding out the estate of the father as a premium for the apostacy of the child, would inculcate a revolt against the first instincts of nature, and the most sacred ordinances of God. Their advocate, at least, saw the penal code in this light. "Is not this," he exclaimed, "against the laws of God and man, against the rules of reason and justice; is not this the most effectual way in the world to make children become undutiful, and to bring the gray head of the parent to the grave with grief and tears!" In speaking thus, he did no more than give vent to the feelings which, being himself a father, he must have deeply experi enced; and the heart of every parent whose cause he was pleading, must have been riven by their utterance. If there was something imposing in the sight of so many of the old Catholic nobility of Ireland, of so many gallant soldiers, gathered round their counsel in a group of venerable figures (for most of those who had fought in the civil wars were now old), the assembly to which they were come to offer their remonstrances must have also presented a very striking spectacle. The Irish House of Commons represented a vietorions and triumphant community. Pride, haughtiness, and disdain, the arrogance of conquest, the appetite of unsatisfied revenge, the consciousness of masterdom, and the determination to employ it, must have given this fierce and despotic convention a very marked character. Most of its members, as well as their Roman Catholic supplicants, had been soldiers; and to the gloom of Puritanism, to which they were still prone, they united a martial and overbearing sternness, and exhibited the flush of victory on their haughty and commanding aspect. To this day, there are some traces of lugubrious peculiarity in the descendants of the Cromwellian settlers in Ireland; at the period of which I speak, the children of the pious adventurers must have exhibited still deeper gloom of visage, and a darker severity of brow. In addressing an assembly so constituted, and in surveying which an ordinary man would have quailed, Sir Theobald Butler had to perform a high and arduous duty. How must he have felt, when, advancing to the bar of the House, he threw his eyes around him, and beheld before him the lurid looks and baleful countenances of the Protestant conquerors of his country, and saw beside him the companions of his SIR THEOBALD BUTLER. 83 youth, the associates of his early life, many of them his own kindred, all of them his fellow-sufferers, clinging to him as to their only stay, and substituting his talents for the arms which he had persuaded them to lay down! The men whom he had seen working the cannon at the batteries of Limerick stood now, with no other safeguard but his eloquence, at the mercy of those whom they had fought in the breach and encountered in the field. An orator of antiquity mentions that he never rose to speak upon an important occasion without a tremor. When the advocate of a whole people rose in the deep hush of expectation, and in all that thrilling silence which awaits the first words of a great public speaker, how must his heart have throbbed! Sir Theobald Butler's speech (I dwell thus long upon the subject, because the event which produced it has been attended. with such important consequences) comprehends almost every reason which can be pressed against the enactment of the penal code, as a violation of public faith. He did not, however, confine himself to mere reasoning upon the subject, but made an attempt to touch the feelings of his Protestant auditors. He has drawn a strong and simple picture of the domestic effects of the penal code in the families of Roman Catholics. by transferring the estate of the father to his renegade son. "That the law should invest any man with the power of depriving his fellow-subject of his property would be a grievance. But my son-my child-the fruit of my body, whom I have nursed in my bosom, and loved more dearly than my life-to become my plunderer, to rob me of my estate, to take away my bread, to cut my throat-it is enough to make the most flinty heart bleed to think on it. For God's sake, gentlemen, make the case your own," &c.* This adjuration exhibits no art of phrase, but it has nature, which, as was observed by Dryden of Otway's plays, is, after *Extracts from Sir Theobald Butler's speech were given about a year ago in the Etoile newspaper, which in a series of articles on Ireland contributed to produce that calculation upon the feeling of the Roman Catholic body recently evinced in the debates of the French parliament. [The extracts referred to were supplied to L'Etoile by Mr. Sh il himself, with other articles (many of them from his own pen), which were retranslated into English, and published by the London press, as indicating French opinions on Irish subjects.-M.] all, the greatest beauty. Those simple words, which contained so much truth, can not be read without emotion; but how far greater must have been their effect when uttered by a parent, who was lifting up his voice to protect the sanctuaries of nature against violation! In what tone must a father have exclaimed, "It would be hard from any man; but from my son, my child, the fruit of my body, whom I have nursed in my bosom!" Surely, in the utterance of this appeal-not by a mere mercenary artificer of passion, but by a man whom everybody knew to be speaking the truth, and whose trembling hands and quivering accents must have borne attestation to his emotions the sternest and most resolved of his judges must have relented, and, like the evil spirit at the contemplation of all the misery he was about to inflict "For a moment stood Divested of his malice." And if the hearts of the Protestant confiscators were touched, did not the tears roll down the faces of the unfortunate Catholics who stood by-did they not turn to sob in the bosom of their children, and, clasping them in their arms, inquire, in the dumb eloquence of that parental embrace, "whether they would ever strike the poniard, with which the law was about to arm them, into their breasts?" Their advocate did not, however, merely appeal to the sensibilities of his auditors, but swept his hand over strings by which a still deeper vibration must have been produced. He assumed a loftier and a bolder tone. He raised himself up to the full height of his mind, and, appealing to the principles of eternal truth and justice, denounced the vengeance of Heaven on those who should be so basely perfidious as to violate a great and sacred compact; and was sufficiently courageous to remind a Protestant House of Commons that the treaty of Limerick had been signed, "when the Catholics had swords in their hands." This was a stirring sentence, and sent many a heart-thrilling recollection into the hearts of those to whom it was addressed. The prince of the conquerors must have started, and the conquered must have looked upon hands in THE TREATY OF LIMERICK. 85 which there were swords no more. It is recorded of an ancient orator, that he exercised over the minds of his heroes an influence so powerful, that his description of a battle was interrupted by the exclamation of a soldier who had been present at the engagement, and whom the spell of eloquence had carried back to the field. Even at this day, every reference to the siege of Limerick produces an extraordinary excitation in Roman Catholic assemblies; and if the descendants of those whose rights were secured by the treaty of Limerick, recur with indignation to the incidents of that celebrated siege, to what a point of excitation must the gallant cavaliers, by whom the advocate of the Irish nation was surrounded, have been wrought, when he, who was himself a party to that great national indenture, with that deep and solemn tone and that lofty gravity of demeanor for which he was remarkable, recalled the events in which almost every man who heard him bore a conspicuous part. It is in the remembrance of such scenes that memory may be justly called, "The actor of our passions o'er again." I do not think that I am guilty of any exaggeration, when I say that in appealing to the time when the Roman Catholics had arms in their hands, the advocate of their rights and the representative of their emotions must have brought back many a martial recollection to the clients in whose front he stood, and whose cause he was so emphatically pleading. The city, from which William at its first siege, with an army of thirty thousand men, had been driven back-the fortress, which art and nature had conspired to make strong, and which valor and constancy would have rendered impregnable-must have risen before them. All the glorious circumstance incidental to their former occupation must have returned. The shout of battle, the roar of the cannon, the bloody foss, the assault and the repulse, the devotion and abandonment, with which whole regiments rushed through the gates, and precipitated themselves into imaginary martyrdom-Sarsfield upon the battlements, the green flag floating from the citadel, and the cry of "Help from France!"-these must have been among the recollections which were awakened by their advocate, while he appealed to |