Most of these wretches were not
soldiers. They acted under no authority known to the law. Yet it was,
he owned, but too evident that they were encouraged and screened by some
who were in high command. How else could it be that a market overt
for plunder should be held within a short distance of the capital? The
stories which travellers told of the savage Hottentots near the Cape of
Good Hope were realised in Leinster. Nothing was more common than for an
honest man to lie down rich in flocks and herds acquired by the industry
of a long life, and to wake a beggar. It was however to small purpose
that Keating attempted, in the midst of that fearful anarchy, to uphold
the supremacy of the law. Priests and military chiefs appeared on the
bench for the purpose of overawing the judge and countenancing the
robbers. One ruffian escaped because no prosecutor dared to appear.
Another declared that he had armed himself in conformity to the orders
of his spiritual guide, and to the example of many persons of higher
station than himself, whom he saw at that moment in Court. Two only of
the Merry Boys, as they were called, were convicted: the worst criminals
escaped; and the Chief justice indignantly told the jurymen that the
guilt of the public ruin lay at their door, [151]

When such disorder prevailed in Wicklow, it is easy to imagine what must
have been the state of districts more barbarous and more remote from the
seat of government. Keating appears to have been the only magistrate who
strenuously exerted himself to put the law in force. Indeed Nugent, the
Chief justice of the highest criminal court of the realm, declared on
the bench at Cork that, without violence and spoliation, the intentions
of the Government could not be carried into effect, and that robbery
must at that conjuncture be tolerated as a necessary evil, [152]

The destruction of property which took place within a few weeks would be
incredible, if it were not attested by witnesses unconnected with each
other and attached to very different interests. There is a close, and
sometimes almost a verbal, agreement between the description given by
Protestants, who, during that reign of terror, escaped, at the hazard
of their lives, to England, and the descriptions given by the envoys,
commissaries, and captains of Lewis. All agreed in declaring that it
would take many years to repair the waste which had been wrought in a
few weeks by the armed peasantry, [153] Some of th