“Well, I got here yesterday about four and found Hutch really, I think, not altered a tittle. ‘Well, my dear Creevey, I’m delighted to see you. What a lucky fellow you are: I’ve got nine ladies to meet you.’ However, as it was, only four came—Lady Hawarden, two daughters and a sister. . . . Lady H. was lively and natural enough, but I had rather severe work with her sister and a daughter, between whom I sat. . . . After dinner you may be quite sure I stuck to Hutch like a leech for information and his opinion upon the present state of things. . . . What a difference in districts! At Besborough—only 17 Irish miles from here, Duncannon has not an apprehension, and during the rebellion of 1798 that part of Waterford took no part in the game of the Killarney district, tho’ so near Bantry Bay. Here we are in the heart of the most disaffected part of Ireland, and a man of any property has a language and a creed in conformity to it.
“‘My dear Creevey,’ said Hutchinson, ‘those rascals the Orange Protestants and the fools of Catholics who [illegible] the Association in Dublin, will bring us to blows. Lord Anglesey* is already acting upon it and calling in all the small bodies of 20 or 30 troops scattered up and down the country, because, in case of accident, they would be sure to be sacrificed.’—‘Well,’ says I, ‘what is your nostrum for settling all this? Would Catholic emancipation do it?’—‘I’ll tell you, my dear Creevey, what it would do. First, it is a most disgraceful thing that Irish contemptible nonsense should be made the foundation of such bad passions. It is only common justice that we should all be on one footing. In this country the Catholicks are 50 to 1: in property we are 20 to their 1. Let us start fair as to laws, and I have a just cause to embark in ‘and my mind is quite made up to fight
* Lord Anglesey, who lost a leg in command of the cavalry at Waterloo, was no coward, yet he wrote in this year to warn the Government that they were on the verge of civil war in Ireland, and advised concession. The Duke of Wellington, though he had made up his mind with Peel for Catholic emancipation, recalled Anglesey from the Lord Lieutenancy, and appointed in his place the Duke of Northumberland, a consistent opponent of emancipation. |
| 1828.] | POWER OF KILFANE. | 175 |
“He and Duncannon are both agreed about the Maynooth priests. This was a piece of Pitt’s handiwork, to have these chaps educated in a Catholic college at home, to escape foreign contagion; and they turn out the lowest and most perfidious villains going, whereas old Magra and a priest of £700 a year at Clonmel, whom Hutch praises most profusely, are of French education, and have all the good manners, at least, of that [illegible] nation. . . . Oh, I forgot, too, that Hutch gave me another good effect of Catholic emancipation: it would separate those of property in matters of the government.”
