“Your son is alive and well,” were his first words.  “He has been all through the siege of Derry, and has behaved like a hero.”

“The Lord be praised!” Jabez said, while his wife burst into tears of relief, for she had gone through terrible anxiety during the long weeks that Derry had been suffering from starvation.

“But how do you know, Master Walter?” Jabez asked.  “Seeing that you were on the side of the besiegers, how could you tell what was passing on the inside of the walls?  How do you know John is alive?”

“Because I saw him first, a month before the end of the siege, and because he came regularly afterwards, to fetch away some provisions which I had placed for him.”

And Walter then gave a full account of John’s visit to the camp, in search of food for the children who were sheltered in the tanner’s house.

“That is just like John,” his mother said.  “He was ever thoughtful for others.  I am more pleased, a hundred times, that he should have so risked his life to obtain food for the little ones, than if he had taken part in the fighting and proved himself a very champion of Derry.”

Parliament had met on the 7th of May.  The session had been opened by a speech from the throne, in which the king commended the loyalty of his Irish subjects, declared his intention to make no difference between Catholics and Protestants, and that loyalty and good conduct should be the only passport to his favour.  He stated his earnest wish that good and wholesome laws should be enacted, for the encouragement of trade and of the manufactures of the country, and for the relief of such as had suffered injustice by the Act of Settlement; that is, the act by which the lands of the Catholics had been handed over, wholesale, to Cromwell’s soldiers and other Protestants.

Bills were speedily passed, abolishing the jurisdiction of English courts of law and of the English parliament in Ireland, and other bills were passed for the regulation of commerce and the promotion of shipbuilding.  The bill for the repeal of the Act of Settlement was brought up on the 22d of May.  It was opposed only by the Protestant bishops and peers, and became law on the 11th of June.  Acts of attainder were speedily passed against some two thousand Protestant landed proprietors, all of whom had obtained their lands by the settlement of Cromwell.

A land tax was voted to the king, of twenty thousand pounds a month, and he proceeded to raise other levies by his private authority.  The result was that the resources of Ireland were speedily exhausted, money almost disappeared, and James, being at his wits’ end for funds, issued copper money stamped with the value of gold and silver; and a law was passed making this base money legal tender, promising that, at the end of the war, it should be exchanged for sterling money.