“. . . I trust you see our Dan O’Connell has denounced poor Barny, altho’ he is Duke of Norfolk, for presuming to say he would give any securities as the price of settling the Catholic question. A greater piece of folly was never committed than this of Barny—so uncalled for—and not to feel sure that O’Connell, in the present plenitude of his power over Catholic Ireland, would never submit to this question being settled by any one but himself, and especially by an English Catholic, who in truth is nobody. Then all this is the more extraordinary in the Duke, because he has told me again [and again] that the great point was for our government and the Pope to settle this question of securities without any of the Irish nation—clergy or laity—knowing a word of what was going on; for, if they did, they would defeat all such arrangements: and then the blockhead is the very man to put the whole matter in a flame by broaching the very subject that, according to himself, could only be settled in private.”
