t that,
if William could not be dislodged from England, the arrangement most
beneficial to France would be that which had been contemplated eighteen
months before when James had no prospect of a male heir. Ireland must
be severed from the English crown, purged of the English colonists,
reunited to the Church of Rome, placed under the protection of the House
of Bourbon, and made, in every thing but name, a French province.
In war, her resources would be absolutely at the command of her Lord
Paramount. She would furnish his army with recruits. She would furnish
his navy with fine harbours commanding all the great western outlets
of the English trade. The strong national and religious antipathy
with which her aboriginal population regarded the inhabitants of the
neighbouring island would be a sufficient guarantee for their fidelity
to that government which could alone protect her against the Saxon.

On the whole, therefore, it appeared to Avaux that, of the two parties
into which the Council at Dublin was divided, the Irish party was that
which it was for the interest of France to support. He accordingly
connected himself closely with the chiefs of that party, obtained from
them the fullest avowals of all that they designed, and was soon able to
report to his government that neither the gentry nor the common people
were at all unwilling to become French, [182]

The views of Louvois, incomparably the greatest statesman that France
had produced since Richelieu, seem to have entirely agreed with those of
Avaux. The best thing, Louvois wrote, that King James could do would
be to forget that he had reigned in Great Britain, and to think only
of putting Ireland into a good condition, and of establishing himself
firmly there. Whether this were the true interest of the House of Stuart
may be doubted. But it was undoubtedly the true interest of the House of
Bourbon, [183]

About the Scotch and English exiles, and especially about Melfort,
Avaux constantly expressed himself with an asperity hardly to have been
expected from a man of so much sense and experience. Melfort was in
a singularly unfortunate position. He was a renegade: he was a mortal
enemy of the liberties of his country: he was of a bad and tyrannical
nature; and yet he was, in some sense, a patriot. The consequence was
that he was more universally detested than any man of his time. For,
while his apostasy and his arbitrary maxims of government made him the
abhorrenc