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extreme difference of opinion, which now exists between you Sir John, and your old friend and correspondent his Holiness, Pius VII, with reference to the order of Jesuits. This is a particular string, upon which, you never touched for many years, after you busied yourself in the Catholic concerns; in fact till after I had charged you with being set and plied by two zealots for antipapacy: duo laborantes in unum. Then you come forward with your Catholic fears about the revival of that order, and openly profess your Catholic commission to communicate those Catholic fears to the House. Protestant fears you had none. By this improvident avowal, you have marred all your speculations upon the appointment of Ministre de Culte to the Catholic subjects of his Majesty. However faithful you may have heretofore been to the orders and directions of the party, they never will forgive your overwhelming excess of candor, in avowing to the House your Catholic credentials, for raising the alarm of Jesuitism. It is more than singular, that this inflammable subject never was introduced, or even hinted at, in any one of the various debates on the Catholic Question, often and warmly as it has been agitated, until you were deputed to be the mouth-piece of certain persons calling themselves Catholics, to excite the alarm of Government at a class of people, who went to Naples, there took orders, and on their return refused to acknowledge the authority of any Diocesan. My first letter to you contains pregnant evidence, that you assumed your Catholic fears of the Order of Jesuits, in the same year, in which Mr. Butler congratulated you upon your having been pleased to make yourself one of us, in a letter intended by him to be circular, for instructing the Irish Catholics upon every interesting topic of

policy and religion in the existing circumstances of 1812. That plan failed in the intended execution: the copy of Mr. Butler's letter to you, Sir John, was sent to Mr. Scully to be read (it was read and disrelished) at the Catholic board. Mr. Scully declared, that his correspondent Mr. Butler was under a misapprehension with respect to the estimation, in which Sir J. C. Hippisley was holden in Ireland*. And Mr. Butler in a letter to Mr. Se cretary Hay, in which he labours hard to repel the charges of obtrusive and unaccredited interference with Government on behalf of the Irish Catholics, says, I was the more unreserved in my « communication with Mr. Scully, as from his letters and his conversation with me in this country,

* If the reader wish for more special information upon these matters, he will find it from page 8o, in my first letter to Sir J. C. Hippisley. And, I presume, will not be lightly astonished, at the bold lesson of politics infused by Mr. Butler into his intended readers, of the secret feelings of our Cabinet, upon the momentum of the Catholic population; their apprehensions of the numerous accidents, which may call it into action, and of its negative effects, even in a state of acquiescence; the undeniable promises of the Prince Regent; Lord Moira driven into a situation, in which he must bully his R. H. and his Royal Highness' great unfitness for such an assault; the distractions of Carlton-House increasing, etc.; the effective array of friend and foe; So out of 100 Irish Members ; Mr. Canning, with an escort of 30; Lord Castlereagh at the head of the Ministerial stragglers; unreturned troops of Dissenters, and of the true Whig School; Lord Castlereagh little attended to in the House of Commons; the inadequacy of Mr. Vansittart to his present situation every day felt more and more; the whole opposite array not furnishing a single speaker: all promising triumph to the views of the Irish Catholics. All this sincerity of effusion was launched under the very intelligible declaration, that the Irish Catholics' want of active and energetic leaders, were great impediments to their

success.

« I considered, that his sentiments and mine, on « all that related to Roman Catholic concerns, were << the same.»>

You have taken the same opportunity of avowing your passion for Mr. Butler (I have great pride and pleasure in avowing a friendship for that gentleman), and of complaining, « that Mr. Plow«den has been pleased to withdraw his confidence «< in me from my having been plied and beset by « others.» All this must have been written by you in the year 1812, since the publication of it bears date the 8th of January, 1813. You mistake the cause of my withdrawing confidence from you. As that circumstance in your mind has so much importance in it, as to bring it under the consideration of the public, it will not be laid to the account of mere prolix ty, if I shortly refer to the circumstances, which produced that change in my mind with reference to your conduct. Had you wished to have set them right upon so momentous a topic, you might have referred them to what I said in my letter to Columbanus*, published in August 1812, concerning the wonderful effects produced by Mr. Canning's motion, on the 22d of the preceding June, for taking the Catholic question into consideration early in the next session. I there noticed your first public vacillation in opinion nd feeling upon the Catholic cause, in your amphibious speech on the 11th of May, 1811; when you entertained the house with profuse lectures, out of the famous blue books published in 1791 and 1792; the avowed labours of your friend Mr. Butler: and unquestionably, said I, you were well impregnated with their spirit.

* P. 338, et seq.

On Mr. Canning's motion, you surprised all your auditors, by a personal attack upon your old friend the Pope. You could shew that the Church «< itself was tired of a foreign yoke: you had com<<munication with a Catholic prelate, stating, that. it was necessary to guard against the intrigues of << Rome.» I gave some account of your secret diplomacy at Rome during the administration of M. Pitt, from your own avowal. Such engagements Sir J. C. Hippisley was authorised to enter into with the Court of Rome: and remarking, that you had gone the length, of calling the legal inhibitions of such intercourse weak, mischievous, and ridiculous, I at last arrived at this conclusion. « It certainly is not too much to say, that of all the « 1021 senators, of which our two Houses of Par«liament consist, Sir John Cox Hippisley is the « very last, from whom these alarms would have been expected*. Neither was it lightly nor in

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Amongst numerous instances of favour and estimation, in which the Honorable Baronet was holden at Rome, is given an extract of a letter, written to him by his present Holiness Pius VII. in the year 1800. << And as the above-mentioned « glorious Sovereign Pontiff, whose authority is of the greatest << weight with us his creature, and to whom we are bounden « by the strongest and sweetest ties of veneration, affection < and gratitude, has given us so many and such manifest « proofs of the high esteem he entertained of the generous « English nation, and of its magnanimous and just Govern<<ment; and was ever so solicitous to cultivate harmony and friendship, and also to demonstrate to that nation, on all « occasions, his most lively attachment; we, also, pursuing « the same steps, will equally make it our study to preserve « with zealous care the same reciprocal good intelligence and « union and we will not suffer (as far as lies in our power), «that England should find seated in the Pontifical Chair of « Rome another Pontiff differing from him, who so invariably « acknowledged the kindness and friendship, that England en<< tertained for him.» In the year 1800, Sir John circulated

considerately said in that letter to Columbanus, that your (*) conversion into one of the strongest alarmists at the intrigues of Rome, was almost as miraculous as that of Saul. Allow me, Sir John, to solicit the peculiar attention of my readers of this letter to you, to the coinciding times and circumstances of your initiation into the doctrines of the blue books, and the first adoption of your alarms and fears of the intrigues of Rome, and the revival of the Order of Jesuits. It was in the session of 1811, that you gratefully boasted of the (1) instructive letter you had received from Mr. Butler, against whom Dr. Milner had within the course of a few days printed in Dublin as foul a libel as ever issued from the press; and in 1812 you had made the wonderful discovery, that the Church itself was tired of a foreign yoke, and that it was necessary to guard against the intrigues of Rome. But hitherto, you were not known to have introduced that fertile subject of obloquy and irritation the Jesuits: yet, in 1813, when you so powerfully sounded the tocsin of alarm, and your Catholic fears of the Jesuits, you eagerly laboured to clear the neophite of want of zeal and ardour in assailing the disbanded and expiring host of Loyola (2). «He had been charged with suppressing the fact «< of the Jesuits establishing themselves in this «< country. Such was not the case: he had com«<municated that fact a year back to the Right

amongst his confidential friends, a superb edition in quarto of his negociations at Rome, concerning the allowance granted to the late Cardinal of York, with fac similes of all the great men's letters to him.

Hist. Let. to Col. 350

(1) Ibid. 341,

(2) See the reports of the debates in the House of Commons, in the Pilot newspaper for the 12th and 25th days of May, 1813.

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