466 Froceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



His letters ai'e not without eyidence that the subject was in his 

 thoughts. But the cli'eacl Yiceroy passed to his doom on Tower Hill, 

 leaving no visible memorial nearer Dublin of his long tenui-e of un- 

 controlled authority than the crumbling walls of the unfinished edifice 

 near the IN'aas road. After Strafford's departure ensued the terrible- 

 epoch that followed the Eebellion of 1641. 



" Fire and sword 

 Eed ruin and breaking up of laws" 



laid hold of Ireland for a full decade, and the war and waste which 

 devastated the whole country nowhere left rader traces than in the 

 streets and fortifications of Dublin and the fortunes of its hapless 

 citizens. It is difficult to picture a scene of greater desolation, 

 indigence, and even famine than is painted in the letters of the Irish 

 Lords Justices in the years immediately following the rebellion and in 

 those of the Yiceroy, afterwards the first Duke of Ormond,^ in the 

 disastrous years that preceded his abandonment of Ireland to the 

 Eoundheads. The decade 1651 to 1660 was one of less disturbance; 

 but a military Govenunent seldom encourages municipal prosperity, 

 and the general sense of the insecurity of the Cromwellian regime was 

 unfavourable to private enterprise. Thus it was not until the 

 Restoration that any effort was made to rescue the city fi'om the decay 

 into which it had fallen. Then, indeed, was witnessed a marvellous 

 change. 



In the year 1661 the Duke of Ormond, sharing the happier 

 fortunes of the cause to which he had clung in adversity, and retui-ned 

 fi'om exile with his master, was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, 

 or, to use the picturesque phrase of the time, " came to the sword." A 

 great nobleman, possessed of a stake in the country greater than that 

 of any other subject of the Crown, Ormond was in the fullest sense a 

 resident viceroy. Having held the sword in the evil days of rebellion 

 and civil war, he knew, as no one else could, all that the country and 

 the capital had suffered, and he returned to Ireland animated with a 

 desire to do all that in him lay to give back prosperity to both. How 

 far he succeeded in the political sphere in fulfilling expectations of 

 which, as he remarked, it would have required another and a larger 

 Ireland to satisfy them all, it is not our present business to discuss, but 

 of the efficacy of his plan for the renovation of Dublin there can be no 

 sort of question. If the exile of the Eoyalists to Paris, Brussels, 



' I-etters of the Irish Lord .Tustices. Ormonde MS. 



