expect. The Lord Lieutenant was in the camp. His bodily and
mental infirmities had perceptibly increased within the last few
weeks. The slow and uncertain step with which he, who had once
been renowned for vigour and agility, now tottered from his easy
chair to his couch, was no unapt type of the sluggish and
wavering movement of that mind which had once pursued its objects
with a vehemence restrained neither by fear nor by pity, neither
by conscience nor by shame. Yet, with impaired strength, both
physical and intellectual, the broken old man clung
pertinaciously to power. If he had received private orders not to
meddle with the conduct of the war, he disregarded them. He
assumed all the authority of a sovereign, showed himself
ostentatiously to the troops as their supreme chief, and affected
to treat Saint Ruth as a lieutenant. Soon the interference of the
Viceroy excited the vehement indignation of that powerful party
in the army which had long hated him. Many officers signed an
instrument by which they declared that they did not consider him
as entitled to their obedience in the field. Some of them offered
him gross personal insults. He was told to his face that, if he
persisted in remaining where he was not wanted, the ropes of his
pavilion should be cut. He, on the other hand, sent his
emissaries to all the camp fires, and tried to make a party among
the common soldiers against the French general.97

The only thing in which Tyrconnel and Saint Ruth agreed was in
dreading and disliking Sarsfield. Not only was he popular with
the great body of his countrymen; he was also surrounded by a
knot of retainers whose devotion to him resembled the devotion of
the Ismailite murderers to the Old Man of the Mountain. It was
known that one of these fanatics, a colonel, had used language