222

HISTORY OR ENGLAND.

chap.

XVII.

J6II1.

most of the regiments there was a division of opinion; but agreat majority declared for France. Henry Luttrell was oneof those who turned olf. He was rewarded for his desertion,and perhaps for other services, with a grant of the large estateof his elder brother Simon, who firmly adhered to the cause ofJames, with a pension of five hundred pounds a year from theCrown, and with the abhorrence of the Roman Catholic popula-tion. After living in wealth, luxury and infamy, during aquarter of a century , Henry Luttrell was murdered while goingthrough Dublin in his sedan chair; and the Irish House ofCommons declared that there was reason to suspect that he hadfallen by the revenge of the Papists.* Eighty years after hisdeath his grave near Luttrellstown was violated by the descen-dants of those whom he had betrayed, and his skull was brokento pieces with a piekaxe.** The deadly hatred of which he wasthe object descended to his son and to his grandson; and, un-happily, nothing in the character either of his son or of hisgrandson tended to mitigate the feeling which the name ofLuttrell excited.***

* Treasury Letter Book, June 19. 1696; Journals of the Irish House ofCommons, Nov. 7. 1717.

** This I relate on Mr. O’Callaghan’s authority. History of the IrishBrigades, Note 47.

*** “There is,” Junius wrote eighty years after the capitulation ofLimerick, “a certain family in this country on which nature seems to haveentailed a hereditary baseness of disposition. As far as their history hasbeen known, the son has regularly improved upon the vices of the father,and has taken care to transmit them pure and undiminished into the bosomof his successors.” Elsewhere he says of the member for Middlesex, “I-Iohas degraded even the name of Luttrell.” lie exclaims, in allusion to themarriage of the Duke of Cumberland and Mrs. Horton, who was born aLuttrell; “Let Parliament look to it. A Luttrell shall never succeed tothe Crown of England.” It is certain that very few Englishmen can havesympathized with Junius’s abhorrence of the Luttrclls, or can even haveunderstood it. Why then did he use expressions which to the great ma-jority of his readers must have been unintelligible? My answer is thatPhilip Francis was born, and passed the first ten years of his life, within a•walk of Luttrellstown.