veered from extreme to extreme?  In 1692 nothing would satisfy him but the heads and quarters of hundreds of poor ploughmen and boatmen who had, several years before, taken some rustic liberties with him at which his grandfather Henry the Fourth would have had a hearty laugh.  In 1693 the foulest and most ungrateful treasons were to be covered with oblivion.  Caermarthen expressed the general sentiment.  “I do not,” he said, “understand all this.  Last April I was to be hanged.  This April I am to have a free pardon.  I cannot imagine what I have done during the past year to deserve such goodness.”  The general opinion was that a snare was hidden under this unwonted clemency, this unwonted respect for law.  The Declaration, it was said, was excellent; and so was the Coronation oath.  Every body knew how King James had observed his Coronation oath; and every body might guess how he would observe his Declaration.  While grave men reasoned thus, the Whig jesters were not sparing of their pasquinades.  Some of the Noncompounders, meantime, uttered indignant murmurs.  The King was in bad hands, in the hands of men who hated monarchy.  His mercy was cruelty of the worst sort.  The general pardon which he had granted to his enemies was in truth a general proscription of his friends.  Hitherto the judges appointed by the usurper had been under a restraint, imperfect indeed, yet not absolutely nugatory.  They had known that a day of reckoning might come, and had therefore in general dealt tenderly with the persecuted adherents of the rightful King.  That restraint His Majesty had now taken away.  He had told Holt and Treby that, till he should land in England, they might hang royalists without the smallest fear of being called to account.436

But by no class of people was the Declaration read with so much disgust and indignation as by the native aristocracy of Ireland.  This then was the reward of their loyalty.  This was the faith of kings.  When England had cast James out, when Scotland had rejected him, the Irish had still been true to him; and he had, in return, solemnly given his sanction to a law which restored to them an immense domain of which they had been despoiled.  Nothing that had happened since that time had diminished their claim to his favour.  They had defended his cause to the last; they had fought for him long after he had deserted them; many of them, when unable to contend longer against superior force, had followed him into banishment; and now it appeared that he was desirous to make peace with his deadliest enemies at the expense of his most faithful friends.  There was much discontent in the Irish regiments which were dispersed through the Netherlands and along the frontiers of Germany and Italy.  Even the Whigs allowed that, for once, the O’s and Macs were in the right, and asked triumphantly whether a prince who had broken his word to his devoted servants could be expected to keep it to his foes?437