In the case of one great offender there were some circumstances which attracted general interest, and which might furnish a good subject to a novelist or a dramatist.  Near fourteen years before this time, Sunderland, then Secretary of State to Charles the Second, had married his daughter Lady Elizabeth Spencer to Donough Macarthy, Earl of Clancarty, the lord of an immense domain in Munster.  Both the bridegroom and the bride were mere children, the bridegroom only fifteen, the bride only eleven.  After the ceremony they were separated; and many years full of strange vicissitudes elapsed before they again met.  The boy soon visited his estates in Ireland.  He had been bred a member of the Church of England; but his opinions and his practice were loose.  He found himself among kinsmen who were zealous Roman Catholics.  A Roman Catholic king was on the throne.  To turn Roman Catholic was the best recommendation to favour both at Whitehall and at Dublin Castle.  Clancarty speedily changed his religion, and from a dissolute Protestant became a dissolute Papist.  After the Revolution he followed the fortunes of James; sate in the Celtic Parliament which met at the King’s Inns; commanded a regiment in the Celtic army; was forced to surrender himself to Marlborough at Cork; was sent to England, and was imprisoned in the Tower.  The Clancarty estates, which were supposed to yield a rent of not much less than ten thousand a year, were confiscated.  They were charged with an annuity to the Earl’s brother, and with another annuity to his wife; but the greater part was bestowed by the King on Lord Woodstock, the eldest son of Portland; During some time, the prisoner’s life was not safe.  For the popular voice accused him of outrages for which the utmost license of civil war would not furnish a plea.  It is said that he was threatened with an appeal of murder by the widow of a Protestant clergyman who had been put to death during the troubles.  After passing three years in confinement, Clancarty made his escape to the Continent, was graciously received at St. Germains, and was entrusted with the command of a corps of Irish refugees.  When the treaty of Ryswick had put an end to the hope that the banished dynasty would be restored by foreign arms, he flattered himself that he might be able to make his peace with the English Government.  But he was grievously disappointed.  The interest of his wife’s family was undoubtedly more than sufficient to obtain a pardon for him.  But on that interest he could not reckon.  The selfish, base, covetous, father-in-law was not at all desirous to have a highborn beggar and the posterity of a highborn beggar to maintain.  The ruling passion of the brother-in-law was a stern and acrimonious party spirit.  He could not bear to think that he was so nearly connected with an enemy of the Revolution and of the Bill of Rights, and would with pleasure have seen the odious tie severed even by the hand of the executioner.  There was one,