Page:Biographia Hibernica volume 1.djvu/422

 CAULFIELD. 411 with the zealous supporters of orthodoxy and oppression, and I was voted out of the chair, not wholly unsuspected of being little better than a papist." The war in which England was engaged with her Ame- rican colonies ultimately involved her in a war with France, and Spain, who, at first covertly, and at last openly espoused the cause of the colonists ; and while England and Ireland were drained of their troops to carry on the ineffectual struggle with the colonies, the European seas swarmed with American and French privateers, and the squadrons of France not only swept the British seas, but hovered on our coasts, and menaced our fleets in the very nmouths of their own harbours. The invasion of Ireland was deemed by France a favourable diversion in support of America, to distract the attention of England, and oblige her to keep her troops at home for the defence of her domestic territories and the project was actually set on foot for the invasion of Ireland, where the whole force of the line, left there, after drafts and selections for American service, consisted of about five hundred men. The people of Belfast, mind- fal of the danger their town had risked eighteen years before, in the former reign, from the descent of Thurot, and conceiving the present a much more formidable and alarming crisis, applied to the government for a force for their protection and that of their province. Bat their application was plainly and candidly answered by Sir Richard Heron, secretary to the then lord-lieutenant, Lord Buckinghamshire, “that government could afford them none." This answer raised alarm throughout the whole country, and, by degrees, roused the whole nation to a sense of the pressing necessity of arming for self-defence against the common danger; and this was the first germ of tbat volunteer army which occupies so prominent a place in the modern history of Ireland. It is not our purpose to detail minutely its growth and progress to maturity. Government had plainly abdicated the national defence. The people volanteered, and armed, and arrayed, at their