Immense sums of money, immense quantities of military stores had been sent over from England.  Immense confiscations were taking place in Ireland.  The rapacious governor had daily opportunities of embezzling and extorting; and of those opportunities he availed himself without scruple or shame.  This however was not, in the estimation of the colonists, his greatest offence.  They might have pardoned his covetousness; but they could not pardon the clemency which he showed to their vanquished and enslaved enemies.  His clemency indeed amounted merely to this, that he loved money more than he hated Papists, and that he was not unwilling to sell for a high price a scanty measure of justice to some of the oppressed class.  Unhappily, to the ruling minority, sore from recent conflict and drunk with recent victory, the subjugated majority was as a drove of cattle, or rather as a pack of wolves.  Man acknowledges in the inferior animals no rights inconsistent with his own convenience; and as man deals with the inferior animals the Cromwellian thought himself at liberty to deal with the Roman Catholic.  Coningsby therefore drew on himself a greater storm of obloquy by his few good acts than by his many bad acts.  The clamour against him was so violent that he was removed; and Sidney went over, with the full power and dignity of Lord Lieutenant, to hold a Parliament at Dublin.401

But the easy temper and graceful manners of Sidney failed to produce a conciliatory effect.  He does not indeed appear to have been greedy of unlawful gain.  But he did not restrain with a sufficiently firm hand the crowd of subordinate functionaries whom Coningsby’s example and protection had encouraged to plunder the public and to sell their good offices to suitors.  Nor was the new Viceroy of a temper to bear hard on the feeble remains of the native aristocracy.  He therefore speedily became an object of suspicion and aversion to the Anglosaxon settlers.  His first act was to send out the writs for a general election.  The Roman Catholics had been excluded from every municipal corporation; but no law had yet deprived them of the county franchise.  It is probable however that not a single Roman Catholic freeholder ventured to approach the hustings.  The members chosen were, with few exceptions, men animated by the spirit of Enniskillen and Londonderry, a spirit eminently heroic in times of distress and peril, but too often cruel and imperious in the season of prosperity and power.  They detested the civil treaty of Limerick, and were indignant when they learned that the Lord Lieutenant fully expected from them a parliamentary ratification of that odious contract, a contract which gave a licence to the idolatry of the mass, and which prevented good Protestants from ruining their Popish neighbours by bringing civil actions for injuries done during the war.402