WILLIAM AND MAKY.

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The fallen dynasty was nothing to him. He had not, likea Cheshire or Shropshire cavalier, been taught from his cradle •to consider loyalty to that dynasty as the first duty of a Christianand a gentleman. All his family traditions, all the lessonstaught him by his foster mother and by his priests, had been ofa very different tendency. He had been brought up to regardthe foreign sovereigns of his native land with the feeling withwhich the Jew regarded Ctesar, with which the Scot regardedEdward the First, with which the Castilian regarded JosephBuonaparte, with which the Pole regards the Autocrat of theRussias. It was the boast of the highborn Milesian that, fromthe twelfth century to the seventeenth, every generation of hisfamily had been in arms against the English crown. His remoteancestors had contended with Fitzstephen and De Burgh. Hisgreatgrandfather had cloven down the soldiers of Elizabeth inthe battle of the Blackwater. His grandfather had conspiredwith O’Honnel against James the First. His father had foughtunder Sir Phelim O’Neill against Charles the First. The con-fiscation of the family estate had been ratified by an Act ofCharles the Second. No Puritan, who had been cited beforethe High Commission by Laud, who had charged under Crom-well at Naseby, who had been prosecuted under the ConventicleAct, and who had been in hiding on account of the Rye House1 Plot, bore less affection to thellouse of Stuart than the O’Harasand Macmahons, on whose support the fortunes of that Housenow seemed to depend.

The fixed purpose of these men was to break the foreignyoke, to exterminate the Saxon colony, to sweep away theProtestant Church, and to restore the soil to its ancientproprietors. To obtain these ends they would without thesmallest scruple have risen up against James; and to obtainthese ends they rose up for him. The Irish Jacobites, therefore,were not at all desirous that he should again reign at Whitehall:Macaulay, History. IV. 12

CHAP.XII.1689 .~