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voices and advocated by only 32. He managed matters so as effectually to silence the oppoaents of the measure, and to re- ward the minority with places or pensions. In the final debate upon the Union, Lord Clare delivered an able speech, stigma- tized in Grattan's Life as " distressing to hear, and delivered with discreditable pur- pose, full of mis-statement, misrepresenta- tion, and calumny." On the other hand, Cornwallis, writing to the Duke of Port- land, says : " The Chancellor exerted his great abilities in a speech of four hours, which produced the greatest surprise and effect on the Lords, and on the audience, which was uncommonly numerous." Lord Clare opposed Cornwallis's desire that the Act of Union should include emancipation of the Catholics, and he was kept in igno- rance of the secret negotiations between the Irish Government and the Catholics, by which Catholic neutrality upon the question was secured through hopes held out of im- mediate measures of relief. This reticence on the part of his colleagues afterwards aroused his most lively indignation — none the less that the hopes held out to the Catho- lics were not realized. The Union accom- plished. Lord Clare set himself vigorously to work to remove many of the abuses in his court. The sale of offices was put an end to, and the post of Master of the Rolls established on a more satisfactory footing. Upon taking his seat in the Im- perial House of Lords, we are told that his irritable and overbearing disposition, his opposition to all liberal views, his sup- port of martial law, and his tendency upon all occasions to depreciate Ireland and Irishmen, rather disgusted his English auditors, and embarrassed a government anxious in words at least to conciliate the Catholics. In private life his friendships were as fixed and sincere as were his pub- lic enmities ; in money matters he was strict anr" punctual ; his hospitality was liberal and splendid; his application to business was incessant. " He did much to establish equity practice in Ireland on a solid basis ; he reformed abuses with no niggard hand, and purged the court of much that called for reform. Fraud fled before him, for when grasped he punished it with relentless rigour. . . His decisions dis- play his great legal mind and, I must add, despotic disposition." '* One of the last public matters in which he interest- ed himself, shortly before his death, was assisting Mrs. Hamilton Rowan to save her husband's property, and to obtain leave to join him on the Continent. Lord Clare died at his mansion in Dublin, after a brief illness, 28th January 1802, aged 53,

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and was buried in St. Peter's churchyard. Eloquent encomiums upon his services to Ireland are to be found in Mr. Froude's English in Ireland. One remarkable pas- sage must not be omitted : " Grattan has been beatified by tradition as the saviour of his country. In his own land his me- mory is adored. . . FitzGibbon is the object of a no less intense national execra- tion. He was foUowed to his grave with curses, and dead cats were flung upon his coffin. If undaunted courage, if the power to recognize and the will to act upon un- palatable truths, if the steady preference of fact to falsehood, if a resolution to op- pose at all hazards those wild illusions which have lain at all times at the root of Ireland's unhappiness, be the constituents of greatness in an Irish statesman, Grattan and FitzGibbon are likely hereafter to change places in the final estimate of his- tory." Cornwallis, although often obliged to differ from Lord Clare, styles him " the most right-headed politician in this coun- try." The death of Viscount FitzGibbon, Lord Clare's grandson, in the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava, brought his lineage to an end. *' ^ 54 7= 76 87

FitzHenry, Miler, grandson of Henry I. by the Welsh princess, Nesta [See Nesta], one of the principal Anglo- Norman invaders of Ireland, was in 1199 appointed Lord-Justice by King John. This post he held until 1203, and again from 1205 to 1208. By his wars in Con- naught he dispossessed the native chief- tains, and obtained large tracts of country. He lowered the overweening power of De Burgh, and deprived him of the govern- ment of Limerick. On his death, in 1220, he was interred in the Abbey of Great Connell, County of Kildare, which he had built. He married a niece of De Lacy. He is thus described by Giraldus Cam- brensis : " Miler was of a dark complexion, with black eyes and a stern, piercing look. Below the middle height, for his size he was a man of great strength. Broad-chested and not corpulent, his arms and other limbs were bony and muscular, and not encumbered with fat. An intrepid and adventurous soldier, he never shrank from any enterprise, whether singly or in company, and was the first in the onset, the last iu retreat. . . He would have deserved the highest praise if he had been less ambitious of worldly honours, and had paid due reverence to the Church of Christ, not only by preserving its ancient rights and privileges inviolate, but also by hal- lowing their new and sanguinary conquest, in which so much blood had been shed, and which was stained by the slaughter of a