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Charles II maintain the Protestant interest, showed no inclination to severity.

Meanwhile no efforts were spared to exasperate English opinion against the Catholics. Sir John Temple's History of the Irish Rebellion, a work in which every calumny against the Irish which panic could devise or malice could exaggerate, is stated in its wildest and most atrocious form, a work, too, of which its author now professed himself ashamed, was re-published and extensively circulated. The position of the Lord Lieutenant was in the highest degree painful and humiliating. Exposed to the bitter attacks of the Talbots and of Sir Ellis Leighton, who had been Secretary under the government of Lord Berkeley, Essex was even more embarrassed by the indiscreet zeal of his friends than by the avowed hostility of his enemies. In truth a nobleman of upright intentions and very moderate talents was of all mankind the least fitted to govern a country "so rent and torn," to use his own words, that he could only compare it to "a deer among a pack of hounds, where every one pulls and tears what he can for himself." Disgusted with the corruption and the faction with which he was powerless to contend, harassed by rumours of intended insurrection which he had the wisdom to disbelieve but lacked the 103