re suffered to pillage
wherever they went. They had contracted all the habits of banditti.
There was among them scarcely one officer capable of showing them their
duty. Their colonels were generally men of good family, but men who had
never seen service. The captains were butchers, tailors, shoemakers.
Hardly one of them troubled himself about the comforts, the
accoutrements, or the drilling of those over whom he was placed. The
dragoons were little better than the infantry. But the horse were, with
some exceptions, excellent. Almost all the Irish gentlemen who had
any military experience held commissions in the cavalry; and, by
the exertions of these officers, some regiments had been raised and
disciplined which Avaux pronounced equal to any that he had ever seen.
It was therefore evident that the inefficiency of the foot and of the
dragoons was to be ascribed to the vices, not of the Irish character,
but of the Irish administration, [434]

The events which took place in the autumn of 1689 sufficiently proved
that the ill fated race, which enemies and allies generally agreed
in regarding with unjust contempt, had, together with the faults
inseparable from poverty, ignorance, and superstition, some fine
qualities which have not always been found in more prosperous and more
enlightened communities. The evil tidings which terrified and bewildered
James stirred the whole population of the southern provinces like the
peal of a trumpet sounding to battle. That Ulster was lost, that the
English were coming, that the death grapple between the two hostile
nations was at hand, was proclaimed from all the altars of three and
twenty counties. One last chance was left; and, if that chance failed,
nothing remained but the despotic, the merciless, rule of the Saxon
colony and of the heretical church. The Roman Catholic priest who had
just taken possession of the glebe house and the chancel, the Roman
Catholic squire who had just been carried back on the shoulders of the
shouting tenantry into the hall of his fathers, would be driven forth to
live on such alms as peasants, themselves oppressed and miserable,
could spare. A new confiscation would complete the work of the Act
of Settlement; and the followers of William would seize whatever the
followers of Cromwell had spared. These apprehensions produced such an
outbreak of patriotic and religious enthusiasm as deferred for a time
the inevitable day of subjugation. Avaux was amazed by