JAMES THE SECOND.

377

The most judicious Irishmen of his own religious persuasion ciiap.were dismayed at his rashness, and ventured to remonstrate 16a6 . 'with him; but he drove them from him with imprecations.*

His brutality was such that many thought him mad. Yet itwas less strange than the shameless volubility with which heuttered falsehoods. He had long before earned the nicknameof Lying Dick Talbot; and, at Whitehall, any wild fictionwas commonly designated as one of Dick Talbot’s truths.

He now daily proved that he was well entitled to this un-enviable reputation. Indeed in him mendacity was almost adisease. He would, after giving orders for the dismission ofEnglish officers, take them into his closet, assure them of hisconfidence and friendship, and implore heaven to confoundhim, sink him, blast him, if he did not take good care of theirinterests. Sometimes those to whom he had thus perjuredhimself learned, before the day closed, that he had cashieredthem.**

On his arrival, though he swore savagely at the Act ofSettlement, and called the English interest a foul thing, aroguish thing, and a damned thing, he yet pretended to beconvinced that the distribution of property could not, afterthe lapse of so many years, be altered.*** But, when he had ncisiiuntbeen a few weeks at Dublin, his language changed. He began pe ai o(to harangue vehemently at the Council board on the necessity sente- ° £of giving back the land to the old owners. He had not, how- m<mt ‘ever, as yet, obtained his master’s sanction to this fatal pro-ject. National feeling still struggled feebly against supersti-tion in the mind of James. He was an Englishman: he wasan English King; and he could not, without some misgivings,consent to the destruction of the greatest colony that England

* Clarendon to Rochester, June 22.1G8G.

" Sheridan MS.; King’s State of the Protestants of Ireland, chap. iii.sec. 3. sec. 8. There is a most striking instance of Tyrconnel’s impudentmendacity in Clarendon’s letter to Rochester, July 22.1086.

*.’* Clarendon to Rochester, June 8. 1686 .