The Roman Catholics, on the other hand, now found themselves indulged to a degree that they had not experienced for nearly a century.  The penal laws at the special instance of the king were suspended in their favour.  Many of the priests returned, and were allowed to establish themselves in their old churches.  They could not do so, however, without violent alarm being awakened upon the other side.  The Irish Protestants remonstrated angrily, and their indignation found a vehement echo in England.  The ’41 massacre was still as fresh in every Protestant’s mind as if it had happened only the year before, and suspicion of Rome was a passion ready at any moment to rise to frenzy.

The heir to the Crown was a Papist, and Charles was himself strongly, and not unreasonably suspected of being secretly one also.  His alliance with Louis XIV” was justifiably regarded with the utmost suspicion and dislike by all his Protestant subjects.  It only wanted a spark to set this mass of smouldering irritation and suspicion into a flame.

That spark was afforded by the murder of Sir Edmondbury Godfrey, under circumstances which were at first believed to point to its having been committed by Papists.  A crowd of perjured witnesses, with Titus Gates at their head, sprang like evil birds of the night into existence, ready to swear away the lives of any number of innocent men.  The panic flew across the Channel.  Irish Roman Catholics of all classes and ages were arrested and flung into prison.  Priests who had ventured to return were ordered to quit the country at once.  Men of stainless honour, whose only crime was their faith, were on no provocation seized and subjected to the most ignominious treatment, and in several instances put to death.

The case of Dr. Plunkett, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Armagh, a man whom even Protestants regarded with the utmost reverence, is the most notorious of these.  Upon a ridiculous charge of being implicated in a wholly mythical French descent, he was dragged over to London, summarily sentenced, convicted, and hung, drawn, and quartered.  Although the most eminent, he was only one, however, of the victims of this most insane of panics.  Reason seemed to have been utterly lost.  Blood and blood alone could satisfy the popular craving, and victim after victim was hurried, innocent but unpitied, to his doom.

At last the tide stayed.  First slackened, then suddenly—­in Ireland at least—­reversed itself, and ran almost as recklessly and as violently as ever, only in the opposite direction.  In 1685 Charles died, and James now king, resolved with hardly an attempt at further concealment to carry out his own long-cherished plans.  From the beginning of his reign his private determination seems to have been to make Ireland a stronghold and refuge for his Roman Catholic subjects, in order that by their aid he might make himself independent both of England and the Parliament, and so carry out that despotism upon which his whole narrow, obstinate soul was inflexibly set.