his own followers, not from the Orangemen. He was sent to the North by the Catholic Association to organise the county Monaghan. When he arrived at the Catholic chapel outside the town of Ballybay he found to his consternation 150,000 men assembled, many of whom were armed with guns, blunderbusses, and ruder weapons. They had lived so long under the Orange magistrates and yeomanry that they secretly determined to give their enemies a signal lesson. A regiment of infantry had been sent to the district, and the Commander, General Thornton, warned Mr. Lawless that he was about to strike the first blow in a civil war. Mr. Lawless exhorted his followers not to enter Ballybay; they could sack the town no doubt, but they would be disobeying the strict commands of the Catholic Association never to violate the law, and next morning they would be an insurgent army with every hand in the island against them. But his remonstrance was thrown away; he was denounced as a coward and a traitor, and in the end had to quit his carriage, mount a horse, and gallop off from his own adherents.[1] When he was gone, the priests, by dividing the multitude into parishes, and each taking charge of his own parishioners, contrived to break up the assembly peaceably; but the task was one of the utmost difficulty and peril.
In Belfast, which was pronounced solid for the Union, a weekly Repeal meeting was held as regularly as in the Corn Exchange. There was a large anti-Repeal majority in the town, no doubt, but the middle-class Presbyterians were not Orangemen, and might be won to love their country as of old—provided always we taught them to respect us; otherwise never.
The Orange Press was furious, but no longer contemptuous. A single extract will suffice to indicate the new spirit which the movement awoke. "The Vindicator (screamed the
- ↑ Mr. William Jackson, a Liberal Protestant of Ballybay, well known at that time, published an account of the day's transactions at a later period in the Nation. The multitude who met Mr. Lawless on the 23rd September, 1828, came, he affirmed, not alone from Monaghan, but from Armagh, Louth, Meath, Cavan, Leitrim, and Tyrone (to which districts notice had been sent from Monaghan), and amounted to nearly 200,000 men. The Orangemen in Ballybay, who did not exceed five hundred, would, he was persuaded, have been destroyed but for the wise moderation of Mr. Lawless.
