Lauzun thither.[1] 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.[2] 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.[3] 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.[4]
On 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.[5] 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
- ↑ See the later letters of Avaux.
- ↑ Avaux to Louvois, March 14/24, 1690; Lauzun to Louvois, March 23/April 2.
- ↑ Story's Impartial History; Lauzun to Louvois, May 20/30, 1690.
- ↑ Lauzun to Louvois, May 28/June 7, 1690.
- ↑ Lauzun to Louvois, April 2/12, May 10/20, 1690. La Hoguette, who held the rank of Marechal de Camp, wrote to Louvois to the same effect about the same time.
