The position of England at this period was any thing but an easy one.  The Rebellion of ’45 had commenced, and the young Pretender had gained some signal victories.  Independently of this, she was alarmed by the rumor of a French invasion on her southern coast.  Apprehensive lest the Irish Catholics, galled and goaded as they were by the influence of the penal laws, and the dreadful persecution which they caused them to suffer, should flock to the standard of Prince Charles, himself a Catholic, she deemed it expedient, in due time, to relax a little, and accordingly she “checked her hand, and changed her pride.”  Milder measures were soon resorted to, during this crisis, in order that by a more liberal administration of justice the resentment of the suffering Catholics might be conciliated, and their loyalty secured.  This, however, was a proceeding less of justice than expediency, and resulted more from the actual and impending difficulties of England than from any sincere wish on her part to give civil and religious freedom to her Catholic subjects, or prosperity to the country in which, even then, their numbers largely predominated.  Yet, singular to say, when the Rebellion first broke out, all the chapels in Dublin were closed, and the Administration, as if guided by some unintelligible infatuation, issued a proclamation, commanding the Catholic priesthood to depart from the city.  Those who refused this senseless and impolitic edict were threatened with the utmost severity of the law.  Harsh as that law was, the Catholics obeyed it; yet even this obedience did not satisfy the Protestant party, or rather that portion of them who were active agents in carrying out this imprudent and unjustifiable rigor at such a period.  They were seized by a kind of panic, and imagined forsooth that a broken down and disarmed people might engage in a general massacre of the Irish Protestants.  Whether this incomprehensible terror was real, is a matter of doubt and uncertainty; or whether it was assumed as a justification for assailing the Catholics in a general massacre, similar to that which they apprehended, or pretended to apprehend, is also a matter of question; yet certain it is, that a proposal to massacre them in cold blood was made in the Privy Council.  “But,” says O’Connor, “the humanity of the members rejected this barbarous proposal, and crushed in its infancy a conspiracy hatched in Lurgan to extirpate the Catholics of that town and vicinity.”

In the meantime, so active was the persecuting spirit of such men as Whitecraft and Smellpriest that a great number of the unfortunate priests fled to the metropolis, where, in a large and populous city, they had a better chance of remaining incogniti than when living in the country, exposed and likely to be more marked by spies and informers.  A very dreadful catastrophe took place about this time.  A congregation of Catholic people had heard mass upon an old loft, which had for many years been decayed—­in fact,