The scene is laid in the neighbourhood of his favourite Derreen, and the period is the middle of the eighteenth century.

The real hero is an English Protestant, Colonel Goring.
Goring "belonged to an order of men who, if they had been allowed fair play, would have made the sorrows of Ireland the memory of an evil dream; but he had come too late, the spirit of the Cromwellians had died out of the land, and was not to be revived by a single enthusiast." He was murdered, and Froude could point his favourite moral that the woes of the sister country would be healed by the appearance of another Cromwell, which he had to admit was improbable.

The Irish hero, Morty Sullivan, has been in France, and is ready to fight for the Pretender.

He did no good.

Few Irishmen, in Froude's opinion, ever did any good.