When Lauzun went to the cabinet of Louvois to receive instructions, the wise minister held language which showed how little confidence he felt in the vain and eccentric knight errant. "Do not, for God's sake, suffer yourself to be hurried away by your desire of fighting. Put all your glory in tiring the English out; and, above all things, maintain strict discipline."626Not only was the appointment of Lauzun in itself a bad appointment: but, in order that one man might fill a post for which he was unfit, it was necessary to remove two men from posts for which they were eminently fit. Immoral and hardhearted as Rosen and Avaux were, Rosen was a skilful captain, and Avaux was a skilful politician. Though it is not probable that they would have been able to avert the doom of Ireland, it is probable that they might have been able to protract the contest; and it was evidently for the interest of France that the contest should be protracted. But it would have been an affront to the old general to put him under the orders of Lauzun; and between the ambassador and Lauzun there was such an enmity that they could not be expected to act cordially together. Both Rosen and Avaux, therefore, were, with many soothing assurances of royal approbation and favour, recalled to France. They sailed from Cork early in the spring by the fleet which had conveyed Lauzun thither.627 Lauzun had no sooner landed than he found that, though he had been long expected, nothing had been prepared for his reception. No lodgings had been provided for his men, no place of security for his stores, no horses, no carriages.628 His troops had to undergo the hardships of a long march through a desert before they arrived at Dublin. At Dublin, indeed, they found tolerable accommodation. They were billeted on Protestants, lived at free quarter, had plenty of bread, and threepence a day.
Lauzun was appointed Commander in Chief of the Irish army, and took up his residence in the Castle.629 His salary was the same with that of the Lord Lieutenant, eight thousand Jacobuses, equivalent to ten thousand pounds sterling, a year. This sum James offered to pay, not in the brass which bore his own effigy, but in French gold. But Lauzun, among whose faults avarice had no place, refused to fill his own coffers from an almost empty treasury.630On him and on the Frenchmen who accompanied him the misery of the Irish people and the imbecility of the Irish government produced an effect which they found it difficult to describe.
Lauzun wrote to Louvois that the Court and the whole kingdom were in a state not to be imagined by a person who had always lived in well governed countries. It was, he said, a chaos, such as he had read of in the book of Genesis. The whole business of all the public functionaries was to quarrel with each other, and to plunder the government and the people. After he had been about a month at the Castle, he declared that he would not go through such another month for all the world. His ablest officers confirmed his testimony.631 One of them, indeed, was so unjust as to represent the people of Ireland not merely as ignorant and idle, which they were, but as hopelessly stupid and unfeeling, which they assuredly were not. The English policy, he said, had so completely brutalised them, that they could hardly be called human beings. They were insensible to praise and blame, to promises and threats. And yet it was pity of them; for they were physically the finest race of men in the world.632By this time Schomberg had opened the campaign auspiciously. He had with little difficulty taken Charlemont, the last important fastness which the Irish occupied in Ulster. But the great work of reconquering the three southern provinces of the island he deferred till William should arrive. William meanwhile was busied in making arrangements for the government and defence of England during his absence. He well knew that the Jacobites were on the alert. They had not till very lately been an united and organized faction. There had been, to use Melfort's phrase, numerous gangs, which were all in communication with James at Dublin Castle, or with Mary of Modena at Saint Germains, but which had no connection with each other and were unwilling to trust each other.633 But since it had been known that the usurper was about to cross the sea, and that his sceptre would be left in a female hand, these gangs had been drawing close together, and had begun to form one extensive confederacy. Clarendon, who had refused the oaths, and, Aylesbury, who had dishonestly taken them, were among the chief traitors. Dartmouth, though he had sworn allegiance to the sovereigns who were in possession, was one of their most active enemies, and undertook what may be called the maritime department of the plot. His mind was constantly occupied by schemes, disgraceful to an English seaman, for the destruction of the English fleets and arsenals. He was in close communication with some naval officers, who, though they served the new government, served it sullenly and with half a heart; and he flattered himself that by promising these men ample rewards, and by artfully inflaming the jealous animosity with which they regarded the Dutch flag, he should prevail on them to desert and to carry their ships into some French or Irish port.634The conduct of Penn was scarcely less scandalous. He was a zealous and busy Jacobite; and his new way of life was even more unfavourable than his late way of life had been to moral purity.
