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Buckingham also had a personal agenda, the desire for revenge on Clarendon and Ormond, the grand old men who had criticised his wildness since the early days of exile and whom he blamed for his current disfavour at court. At this precise moment he had a new grudge against Ormond, whose second son, the Earl of Arran, had just married Buckingham’s niece Mary, daughter of the Duke of Richmond and Lennox. As he had no children himself, a child of this marriage would not only inherit the Richmond estates in Scotland, but would be heir-at-law to all his own Villiers estates. The thought of his land passing to Ormond’s family was intolerable. As it happened, Mary died the following July, aged eighteen, but in the autumn of 1666 the threat seemed real, and was deeply resented. The Duke’s first target therefore was Ormond, and Ireland.
     
    Most English MPs saw Ireland as a nuisance, a drain on the revenue. In the early 1660s they were more worried about the poverty of the English countryside than about the Irish landlords and peasants. To protect England’s farmers, in 1663 the Commons had passed a partial restriction on importing cattle from Ireland, limiting the trade to certain months. They later tried to extend this, but when it reached the Lords Charles declared firmly that he would never give the royal assent. This autumn, when Charles’s position was weakened by his need for money, the Commons reintroduced the bill in a more extreme form, banning the import of Irish cattle outright. It was a controversial measure, backed by the members from the ‘breeding party’ in Wales and the northern and western counties, who wanted to raise the prices of local-bred cattle and prevent rents from falling, but opposed by those who represented the ‘feeding’ counties, of East Anglia, and by Londoners who wanted cheap meat.
    The Irish were appalled and Charles resisted the bill firmly, knowing that the cattle trade was Ireland’s one hope of relief. Without it the economy would be devastated and the Irish government reliant on English subsidies. The Dublin treasury was already so empty that Ormond was reduced to paying the troops out of his own pocket. When there was mutiny among the garrison at Carrickfergus, he rode there himself at the head of four hundred men, but even these troops had not been paid for seven months, and he feared that they too might join the rebels. 4 If they did so, when the French had landed there would be no one to oppose them (This was no fantasy: passing through Paris the following year the Earl of Essex was horrified to find Henrietta Maria trying to mediate between Louis and Irish Catholics seeking money and troops.) 5 The passing of the bill, said Ormond, might stir yet more unrest.
    In direct, almost jubilant opposition, the Buckingham clique picked up the Irish Cattle Bill and ran with it. Temple pushed the bill forward in the Commons, and it was passed after only three weeks, with a key clause, added by Seymour, describing the trade as a ‘common and public nuisance’, a technicality that prevented Charles from using his prerogative to reinstate it. Then came a month of acrimonious argument in the Lords, where Buckingham and Ashley (who had investments in Scottish cattle and hated Ormond and the Irish) faced Clarendon, Anglesey and the bishops and Catholic peers, eager to win royal favour. During one debate, Buckingham quipped, amid much ‘mirth and laughter’, that those who opposed the bill ‘had either an Irish interest or an Irish understanding’. (Which, noted Pepys, ‘is as much as to say he is a fool’. 6 ) Enraged at this slight, Ormond’s son Ossory challenged Buckingham: both men were sent to the Tower for three days until they apologised to the House. The quarrel threatened to spread. Arlington was apparently ‘so warm in defence of Ossory’ that if the House of Lords had not interposed, a new challenge would have ‘sprang out of the embers of the former’. 7 A month later