[Illustration:  LORD EDWARD FITZGERALD. (After a picture by Hamilton.)]

Only a few days before this date his hiding-place was betrayed to the Government by a man named Magan.  A guard of soldiers was sent to arrest him, and a desperate struggle took place, in the course of which the captain of the guard was fatally stabbed, while Lord Edward himself received a bullet on the shoulder from the effects of which he shortly afterwards died in goal.  Within a day or two of his arrest all the other leaders in Dublin were also seized and thrown into prison.

The whole of the executive committee were thus removed at one blow, and the conspiracy left without head.  In estimating the hideous character finally assumed by the rising this fact must never be forgotten.  The sickening deeds committed while it was at its height were committed by a mass of ignorant men, maddened by months of oppression, and deprived of their leaders at the very moment they most required their control.

In the meantime the 24th of May had come, and the rising had broken out.  The non-arrival of the daily mail-coaches was to be the signal, and these were stopped and burnt by the insurgents in four different directions at once.  In Kildare and Meath scattered parties of soldiers and yeomanry were attacked and killed, and at Prosperous the barracks were set on fire, and the troops quartered in it all burnt or piked.  In Dublin prompt measures had been taken, and the more loyal citizens had enrolled themselves for their own defence, so that no rising took place there, the result being that the outlying insurgents found themselves isolated.  In the north especially, where the whole movement had taken its rise, and where the revolutionists had long been organized, the actual rising was thus of very trifling importance, and the whole thing was easily stamped out within a week.

It was very different in Wexford.  Here from the beginning the rising had assumed a religious shape, and was conducted with indescribable barbarity.  Yeomanry corps and bodies of militia had been quartered in the county for months, and many acts of tyranny had been committed.  These were now hideously avenged.  Several thousand men and women, armed chiefly with pikes and scythes, collected together on the hill of Oulart under the guidance of a priest named Father John Murphy.  They were attacked by a small party of militia from Wexford, but defeating them, burst into Ferns, where they burnt the bishop’s palace, then hastened on to Enniscorthy, which they took possession of, and a few days afterwards appeared before the town of Wexford.