CHAPTER I THE EVENTS OF THE RAIN OF EDWARD VI. On the last day of January, 1547, Edward, son of Henry, by Lady Jane Seymour, was crowned by the title of Edward VI. He was then only nine years old, and was destined to wear the crown but for six years and a few months. No Irish Parliament was convened during his reign, but the Reformation was pushed on with great vigor, at first under the patronage of the Protector, his uncle, and subsequently of that uncle's rival, the Duke of Northumberland. Archbishop Cranmer suffered the zeal of neither of these statesmen to flag for want of stimulus, and the Lord Deputy St. Ledger, judging from the cause of his disgrace in the next reign, approved himself a willing assistant in the work. The Irish Privy Council, which exercised all the powers of government during this short reign, was composed exclusively of partisans of the Reformation. Besides Archbishop Brown and Staples Bishop of Miath, its members were the Chancellor, Reed, and the Treasurer, Brabazan, both English, with the judges Almer, Latrell, Bath, Cusack, and Houth, all proselytes at least informed to the new opinions. The Earl of Ormond, with sixteen of his household, having been poisoned at a banquet in Eli House, London, in October before Henry's death, the influence of that great house was wielded during the minority of his successor by Sir Francis Bryan, an English adventurer who married the widowed Countess. This lady being, moreover, daughter and heir general to James, Earl of Desmond, brought Bryan powerful connections in the South, which he was not slow to turn to a politic account. His ambition aimed at nothing less than the supreme authority, military and civil, but when at length he attained the summit of his hopes, he only lived to enjoy them a few months. To enable the Deputy and Council to carry out the work they had begun, an additional military force was felt to be necessary, and Sir Edward Bellingham was sent over, soon after Edward's accession, with a detachment of six hundred horse, four hundred foot, and the title of Captain General. This able officer, in conjunction with Sir Francis Bryan, who appears to have been everywhere, overran awfully, Lex, Eli, and Westmiath, sending the chiefs of the two former districts as prisoners to London, and making advantageous terms with those of the latter. He was, however, supplanted in the third year of Edward by Bryan, who held successively the rank of Marshal of Ireland and Lord Deputy. To the latter office he was chosen on an emergency by the Council in December fifteen forty-nine, but died at Clonmel on an expedition against the O'Carrolls in the following February. His successes and those of Bellingham hastened the reduction of Lex and Offaly into shire ground in the following rain. The total military force at the disposal of Edward's commanders was probably never less than ten thousand effective men. By the aid of their abundant artillery they were unable to take many strong places hitherto deemed impregnable to assault. The mounted men and infantry were, as yet, but partially armed with muscatons or fire-locks, for the spear and the bow still found advocates among military men. The spearmen or lancers were chiefly recruited on the marches of Northumberland from the hardy race of border warriors. The mounted bowmen or hubbillars were generally natives of Chester or North Wales. Between these newcomers and the native Anglo-Irish troops many contentions arose from time to time, but in the presence of the common foe these bickering were completely forgotten. The townsmen of Waterford marched promptly at a call under the standard of the three galleys and those of Dublin as cheerfully turned out under the well-known banner decorated with three flaming towers. The personnel of the administration, in the six years of Edward, was continually undergoing change. Bellingham, who succeeded St. Ledger, was supplanted by Brian, on whose death St. Ledger was reappointed. After another year Sir James Croft was sent over to replace St. Ledger and continued to fill the office until the accession of Queen Mary. But whoever rose or fell to the first rank in civil affairs the privy council remained exclusively Protestant and the work of innovation was not suffered to languish. A manuscript account attributed to Adam Loftus, Brown's successor, assigns the year 1549 as the date when the mass was put down in Dublin and divine service was celebrated in English. Bishop Mant, the historian of the established church in Ireland, does not find any account of such an alteration, nor does the statement appear to him consistent with subsequent facts of this reign. We observe also that in 1550 Arthur McGuinness, the Pope's Bishop of Dromir, was allowed by the government to enter on possession of his temporalities after taking an oath of allegiance, while King's bishops were appointed in that and the next two years to the vacancies of Kildare, Leglin, Ossyrie and Limerick. A vacancy having occurred in the Sea of Casual in 1551 it was unaccountably left vacant as far as the crown was concerned during the remainder of this reign, while a similar vacancy in Armagh was filled, at least in name, by the appointment of Dr. Hugh Goodacre, chaplain to the Bishop of Winchester and a favorite preacher with the Princess Elizabeth. This prelate was consecrated, according to a new form, in Christchurch Dublin on the 2nd of February 1523, together with his countryman John Bale, Bishop of Ossyrie. The officiating prelates were Brown, Staples and Lancaster of Kildare, all English. The Irish establishment, however, does not at all times rest its argument for the validity of its episcopal order upon these consecrations. Most of their writers lay claim to the apostolic succession through Adam Loftus, consecrated in England, according to the ancient rite, by Hugh Kerwin, an archbishop in communion with the Sea of Rome, at the time of his elevation to the Episcopacy. In February 1551, Sir Anthony St. Ledger received the king's commands to cause the scriptures translated into the English tongue, and the liturgy and prayers of the church, also translated into English, to be read in all the churches of Ireland. To render these instructions effective, the deputies summoned a convocation of the archbishops, bishops, and clergy to meet in Dublin on the 1st of March 1551. In this meeting, the first of two in which the defenders of the old and of the new religion met face to face, the Catholic party was led by the intrepid doudal, archbishop of Armagh, and the reformers by Archbishop Brown. The deputy, who, like most laymen of that age, had a strong theological turn, also took an active part in the discussion. Finally delivering the royal order to Brown, the latter accepted it in a set form of words, without reservation. The Anglican bishops of Mieth, Kildare, and Leglan, and Coyne, Bishop of Limerick, adhering to his act, primate doudal with the other bishops, having previously retired from the conference. On Easter Day following, the English service was celebrated for the first time in Christ Church, Dublin, the deputy, the archbishop, and the mayor of the city assisting. Brown preached from the text, open mine eyes that I may see the wonders of the law, a sermon chiefly remarkable for its fierce invective against the new order of Jesuits. Primate doudal retired from the castle conference to St. Mary's Abbey on the north side of the Liffey, where he continued while these things were taking place in the city proper. The new Lord Deputy, Sir James Crofts, on his arrival in May, addressed himself to the primate to bring about, if possible, an accommodation between the prelates. Fearing, as he said, an order ere long to alter church matters, as well in offices as in ceremonies, the new deputy urged another conference, which was accordingly held at the primate's lodgings on the 16th of June. At this meeting Brown does not seem to have been present, the argument on the side of the reformers being maintained by staples. The points discussed were chiefly the essential character of the holy sacrifice of the mass, and the invocation of the saints. The tone observed on both sides was full of high-bred courtesy. The letter of the sacred scriptures and authority of Erasmus in church history were chiefly relied upon by staples. The common consent and usage of all Christendom, the primacy of St. Peter, and the binding nature of the oath taken by bishops at their consecration were pointed out by the primate. The disputants parted, with the expressions of deep regret that they could come to no agreement, but the primacy was soon afterwards transferred to Dublin by order of the privy council, and doubtful fled for refuge into Brabant. The Roman Catholic and the Anglican Episcopacy have never since met in oral controversy on Irish ground, though many of the second order of the clergy in both communions have, from time to time, been permitted by their superiors to engage in such discussions. Whatever obstacles they encountered within the church itself, the propagation of the new religion was not confined to moral means, nor was the spirit of opposition at all times restricted to mere argument. Bishop Bale, having begun at Kilkenny to pull down the revered images of the saints and to overturn the market-cross, was set upon by the mob. Five of his servants, or guard, were slain, and himself narrowly escaped with his life by barricading himself in his palace. The garrisons in the neighborhood of the ancient seats of ecclesiastical power and munificence were authorized to plunder their sanctuaries and storehouses. The garrison of Downes sacked the celebrated shrines and tomb of Patrick, Bridget, and Cullumkill. The garrison of Carrick-Fergus ravaged Rathlin Island and attacked Derry, from which, however, they were repulsed with severe loss by John the Proud. But the most lamentable scene of spoilation, and that which excited the profoundest emotions of pity and anger in the public mind, was the violation of the churches of St. Ciaran, the renowned Clon McNoise. This city of schools had cast its cross-crowned shade upon the gentle current of the Upper Shannon for a thousand years. Danish fury, civil storm, and Norman hostility had passed over it, leaving traces of their power in the midst of the evidences of its recuperation. The great church to which pilgrims flocked from every tribe of Aaron on the 9th of September, St. Ciaran's Day, the numerous chapels erected by the chiefs of all the neighboring clans, the halls, hospitals, bookhouses, nunneries, cemeteries, granaries, all still stood, awaiting from Christian hands the last fatal blow. In the neighboring town of Athelone, seven or eight miles distant, the treasurer, Brabazon, had lately erected a strong court, or castle, from which, in the year 1552, the garrison sallied forth to attack the place of the sons of the nobles, which is the meaning of the name. In executing this task, they exhibited a fury surpassing that of Turgessius and his Danes. The pictured glass was torn from the window frames, and the revered images from their niches. Alters were overthrown, sacred vessels polluted. They left not, say the foremasters, a book or a gem, nor anything to show what Clon McNoise had been, save the bare walls of the temples, the mighty shaft of the round tower, and the monuments in the cemeteries, with their inscriptions in Irish, in Hebrew, and in Latin. The shannon re-echoed with their profane songs and laughter, as laden with chalices and crucifixes, brandishing croissiers, and flouting vestments in the air, their barges returned to the walls of Athelone. In all the Gaelic-speaking regions of Ireland, the new religion now began to be known by those fruits which it had so abundantly produced. Though the southern and midland districts had not yet recovered from the exhaustion consequent upon the suppression of the Geraldine League and the abortive insurrection of Silken Thomas, the northern tribes were still unbroken and undismayed. They had deputed George Paris, a kinsman of the Kildare Fitzgeralds, as their agent to the French king, in the latter days of Henry VIII, and had received two ambassadors on his behalf at Donogull and Dunganon. These ambassadors, the Baron de Fort Vaux and the Sœur de Montluc, who subsequently became Bishop of Valence, crossing over from the west of Scotland, entered into a league, offensive and defensive, with the princes of Tyr Connell and Tyr Owen, by which the latter bound themselves to recognize, on certain conditions, whoever was king of France as king of Ireland likewise. This alliance, though prolonged into the reign of Edward, led to nothing definitive, and we shall see in the next reign how the hopes then turned towards France were naturally transferred to Spain. The only native name which rises into historic importance at this period is that of Shane, or John O'Neill, the proud. He was the legitimate son of that con O'Neill who had been girt with the Earl's Baldrick by the hands of Henry VIII. His father had procured at the same time for an illegitimate son, Farrodoc, or Matthew of Dundalk, the title of Baron of Dunganon, with the reversion of the earldom. When, however, John the proud came of age, he centred upon himself the hopes of his clansmen, deposed his father, subdued the Baron, and assumed the title of O'Neill. In 1552 he defeated the efforts of Sir William Brabazon to fortify Belfast, and delivered Derry from its plunderers. From that time till his tragical death, in the ninth year of Queen Elizabeth, he stood unquestionably the first man of his race, both in lineage and action. The Death of Edward VI and the Assession of the Lady Mary were known in Dublin by the middle of July 1553, and soon spread all over the kingdom. On the twentieth of that month the form of proclamation was received from London, in which the new queen was forbidden to be styled head of the church, and this was quickly followed by another ordinance authorizing all who would to publicly attend mass, but not compelling there too any who were unwilling. A curious legal difficulty existed in relation to Mary's title to the Crown of Ireland. By the Irish statute, 38th Henry VIII, the Irish crown was entailed by name on the Lady Elizabeth, and that act had not been repealed. It was, however, held to have been superseded by the English statute, 35th Henry VIII, which followed the election of 1541, and declared the Crown of Ireland united and knit to the imperial crown of the realm of England. And in the light of the latter statute the Irish sovereignty might be regarded a mere appurtenance of that of England, but Mary did not so consider it. At her coronation a separate crown was used for Ireland, nor did she feel assured of the validity of her claim to wear it till she had obtained a formal dispensation to that effect from the Pope. The intelligence of the new queen's Assession and the public restoration of the old religion diffused a general joy throughout Ireland. Festivals and pageants were held in the streets, and eloquent sermons poured from all the pulpits. Archbishop Dowdo was called from exile, and the primacy was restored to Armagh. Sir Anthony St. Ledger, his ancient antagonist, had now conformed to the court fashion, and was sent over to direct the establishment of that religion which he had been so many years engaged in pulling down. In 1554, Brown staples, Lancaster and Travers were formally deprived of their seas. Bale and Casey of Limerick fled beyond the seas without awaiting judgment. Married clergymen were invariably silenced, and the children of Brown were declared by statute illegitimate. What, however, gratified the public even more than these retributions was the liberation of the aged chief of Offaly from the Tower of London at the earnest supplication of his heroic daughter Margaret, who found her way to the Queen's presence to beg that boon, and the simultaneous restoration of the earldom of Kildare in the person of that Gerald, who had been so young a fugitive amongst the glens of Muscarey and Donegal, and had since undergone so many continental adventures. With O'Connor and young Gerald, the heirs of the houses of Ormond and Upper Ossary were also allowed to return to their homes to the great delight of the southern half of the kingdom. The subsequent marriage of Mary with Philip II of Spain gave an additional security to the Irish Catholics for the future freedom of their religion. Great as was the change in this respect, it is not to be inferred that the national relations of Ireland and England were materially affected by such a change of sovereign. The maxims of conquest were not to be abandoned at the dictates of religion. The supreme power continued to be entrusted only to Englishmen, while the same Parliament, Third and Fourth Philip and Mary, which abolished the title of Head of the Church, and restored the Roman jurisdiction in matters spiritual, divided Lietz and Offaly, Glenmalier and Slumargy into shire-ground, subject to English law under the name of Kings and Queen's County. The new forts of Maryborough and Philipstown, as well as the county names, served to teach the people of Lenster that the work of conquest could be as industriously prosecuted by Catholic as well as Protestant rulers. Nor were these forts established and maintained without many a struggle. Saint Ledger and his still abler successor, the Earl of Sussex, and the new Lord Treasurer, Sir Henry Sidney, were forced to lead many an expedition to the relief of those garrisons, and the dispersion of their assailants. It was not in Irish human nature to submit to the constant pressure of a foreign power, without seizing every possible opportunity for its expulsion. The new principle of primogeniture, introduced at the commutation of chieftainries into earldoms, was productive in this reign of much commotion and bloodshed. The seniors of the O'Brien's resisted its establishment in Thulmund, on the death of the First Earl. Calvagh O'Donnell took arms against his father to defeat its introduction into Tyr Connell. John the Proud, as we have seen in the reign of Edward, had been one of its earliest opponents in Ulster. Being accused in the last year of Queen Mary of procuring the death of his illegitimate brother, the Baron of Dunn-Gannon, in order to remove him from his path, he was summoned to account for those circumstances before Sir Henry Sidney, then acting as Lord Justice. His plea has been preserved to us, and no doubt represents the prevailing opinion of the Gaelic-speaking population towards the new system. He answered that the surrender which his father had made to Henry VIII, and the restoration which Henry had made to his father again, were of no force, inasmuch as his father had no right to the lands which he surrendered to the king, except during his own life. That he, John, himself was the O'Neill by the law of tenestry and by popular election, and that he assumed no superiority over the chieftains of the North except what belonged to his ancestors. To these views he adhered to the last, accepting no English honours, though quite willing to live at peace with English sovereigns. When the title of Earl of Tyrone was revived, it was in favour of the son of the Baron, the celebrated Hugh O'Neill, the ally of Spain and the most formidable antagonist of Queen Elizabeth. In the Irish Parliament already referred to, III and IV Philip and Mary, an act was passed declaring it a felony to introduce armed Scotchmen to Ireland, or to intermarry with them without a license under the Great Seal. This statute was directed against those multitudes of Islesmen and Highlanders who annually crossed the narrow strait which separates Antrim from Argyle to harass the English garrisons along shore, or to enlist as auxiliaries in Irish corals. In 1556, under one of their principal leaders, James, son of Connell, they laid siege to Carrick-Fergus and occupied Lord Sussex some six weeks in the glens of Antrim. Their leader finally entered into conditions, the nature of which may be inferred from the fact that he received the honour of knighthood on their acceptance. John O'Neill had usually in his service a number of these mercenary troops, from among whom he selected sixty bodyguards, the same number supplied by his own clan. In his first attempt to subject to your Connell to his supremacy in 1557, his camp near Raffault was surprised at night by Calvagh O'Donnell, and his native and foreign guards were put to the sword, while he himself barely escaped by swimming the moorne in the fin. O'Donnell had frequently employed a similar force in his own defence, and we read of the Lord of Clannercard, driving back a host of them engaged in the service of his rivals, from the banks of the Mooy in 1558. Although the memory of Queen Mary has been held up to excretion during three centuries as a bloody-minded and malignant persecutor of all who differed from her in religion, it is certain that in Ireland, where if anywhere the Protestant minority might have been extinguished by such severities as are imputed to her, no persecution for consciousness's sake took place. Married bishops were deprived, and married priests were silenced, but beyond this no coercion was employed. It has been said that there was not time to bring the machinery to bear, but surely if there was time to do so in England, within the space of five years, there was time in Ireland also. The consoling truth, honourable to human nature and a Christian charity, is that many families out of England, apprehending danger in their own country, sought and found a refuge from their fears in the western island. The families of Agar, Ellis, and Harvey are descended from immigrants, who were accompanied from Cheshire by a clergyman of their own choice, whose administrations they freely enjoyed during the remainder of this reign at Dublin. The story about Dr. Cole having been dispatched to Ireland with a commission to punish heretics and losing it on the way is unworthy of serious notice. If there had been any such determination formed there was ample time to put it into execution between 1553 and 1558. CHAPTER III A SESSION OF QUEEN ELIZABETH, PARLUMENT OF 1560, THE ACTIVE UNIFORMITY, CAREER AND DEATH OF JOHN O'NEIL, THE PROUD. The daughter of Anna Bolin was promptly proclaimed queen the same day on which Mary died, the seventeenth of November, 1558. Elizabeth was then in her twenty-sixth year, proud of her beauty and confident in her abilities. Her great capacity had been cultivated by the best masters of the age, and the best of all ages, early adversity. Her vices were hereditary in her blood, but her genius for government so far surpassed any of her immediate predecessors as to throw her vices into the shade. During the forty-four years in which she wielded the English scepter many of the most stirring occurrences of our history took place. It could hardly have fallen out otherwise under a sovereign of so much vigor having the command of such immense resources. On the news of Mary's death reaching Ireland the Lord Deputy Sussex returned to England, and Sir Henry Sidney, the treasurer, was appointed his successor at interim. As in England so in Ireland, though for somewhat different reasons, the first months of the new reign were marked by a conciliating and temporizing policy. Elizabeth, who had not assumed the title of head of the church, continued to hear Mass for several months after her accession. At her coronation she had a high Mass-sung, accompanied it is true by a Calvinistic sermon. Before proceeding with the work of Reformation, inaugurated by her father, and arrested by her sister, she proceeded cautiously to establish herself, and her Irish deputy followed in the same careful line of conduct. Having first made a menacing demonstration against John the Proud, he entered into friendly correspondence with him, and finally ended the campaign by standing Godfather to one of his children. This relation of gossip among the old Irish was no mere matter of ceremony, but involved obligations lasting as life and sacred as the ties of kindred blood. By seeking such a sponsor, O'Neill placed himself in Sydney's power, rather than Sydney in his, since the two men must have felt very differently bound by the connection into which they had entered. As an evidence of the imperial policy of the moment, the incident is instructive. Beyond the personal history of this splendid, but by no means stainless Ulster Prince, the events of the first nine years of Elizabeth's reign over Ireland naturally grouped themselves. Whether at Her Majesty's Council Board, or among the Scottish Islands, or in Hall or Hutt at home, the attention of all manner of men interested in Ireland was fixed upon the movements of John the Proud. In tracing his career, we therefore naturally gather all, or nearly all, the threads of the national story, during the first ten years of Queen Mary's successor. In the second year of Elizabeth, Lord Deputy Sussex, who returned fully possessed of Her Majesty's views, summoned the Parliament to meet at Dublin on the twelfth day of January, 1560. It is to be observed, however, that though the union of the crowns was now twenty years standing, the rits were not issued to the nation at large, but only to the ten counties of Dublin, Mieh, Louth, West Mieh, Kildare, Carlow, Kilkenny, Wexford, Waterford, and Tipperary with their boroughs. The published instructions of Lord Sussex were to make such statutes concerning religion as were made in England, Mutatis Mutandis. As a preparation for the Legislature, St. Patrick's Cathedral and Christchurch were purified by paint. The niches of the saints were, for the second time, emptied of their images, text of Scripture were blazoned upon the walls, and the litany was chanted in English. After these preparatory demonstrations, the deputy opened the new Parliament, which sat for one short but busy month. The Acts of Mary's Parliament, re-establishing ecclesiastical relations with Rome, were the first thing repealed. Then so much of the Act XXXIII Henry VIII, as related to the secession, was revived. All ecclesiastical jurisdiction was next declared bested in the crown, and all judges, justices, mayors, and temporal officers were declared bound to take the oath of supremacy. The penalty attached the refusal of the oath by this statute being forfeiture of office and promotion during life. Proceeding rapidly in the same direction, it was declared that commissioners in ecclesiastical causes should adjudge nothing as heresy, which was not expressly so condemned by the canonical scriptures that received general counsels or by Parliament. The penalty of primnuré was declared in force, and to crown the work the celebrated Act of Uniformity was passed. This was followed by other statutes for the restoration of first fruits and twentieths, and for the appointment of bishops by the royal prerogative, or conje de l'airé, elections by the chapter being declared mere shadows of elections, and derogatory to the prerogative. Such was, in brief, the legislation of that famous Parliament of ten counties, the often quoted statutes of the second of Elizabeth. In the Act of Uniformity, the best known of all its statutes, there was this curious saving clause inserted, that whenever the priest or common minister could not speak English, he might still continue to celebrate the service in the Latin tongue. Such other observances were to be had as were prescribed by the second Edward VI, until Her Majesty should publish further ceremonies or rites. We have no history of the debates of this Parliament of a month, but there is ample reason to believe that some of these statutes were resisted throughout by a majority of the upper house, still chiefly composed of Catholic peers, that the clause saving the Latin ritual was inserted as a compromise with this opposition, that some of the other acts were passed by stealth in the absence of many members, and that the Lord Deputy gave his solemn pledge the Statute of Uniformity should be enforced if passed. So severe was the struggle, and so little satisfied with Sussex with his successes, that he hastily dissolved the houses and went over personally to England to represent the state of feeling he had encountered. Finally, it is remarkable that no other Parliament was called in Ireland till nine years afterwards, a convincing proof of how unmanageable that body, even constituted as it was, had shown itself to be in matters affecting religion. The non-invitation of the Irish chiefs to this Parliament, contrary to the precedent set in Mary's reign and in 1541, the laws enacted and the commotion they excited in the minds of the clergy were circumstances which could not fail to attract the attention of John O'Neill. Even if insensible to what transpired at Dublin, the indefatagable Sussex, one of the ablest of Elizabeth's able court, did not suffer him long to misunderstand his relations to the new Queen. He might be Sidney's gossip, but he was not the less Elizabeth's enemy. He had been proclaimed O'Neill on the wrath of Telehogue, and had reigned at Dunganon, a judging life and death. It was clear that two such jurisdictions as the Celtic and the Norman kingship could not stand long on the same soil, and the Ulster Prince soon perceived that he must establish his authority by arms or perish with it. We must also read all Irish events of the time of Elizabeth by the light of foreign politics. During the long reign of that sovereign, England was never wholly free from fears of invasion, and many movements which now seem inexplicable will be readily understood when we recollect that they took place under the menaces of foreign powers. The O'Neill's had anciently exercised a high-handed superiority over all Ulster, and John the Proud was not the man to let his claim lie idle in any district of that widespread province. But authority which has fallen into decay must be asserted only at a propitious time, and with the utmost tact, and here it was that Elizabeth's statesmen found their most effective means of attacking O'Neill. O'Donnell, who was his father-in-law, was studiously conciliated. His second wife, a lady of the Argyle family, received costly presence from the Queen. O'Reilly was created Earl of Brefney, and encouraged to resist the superiority to which the House of Dunganon laid claim. The natural consequences followed. John the Proud swept like a storm over the fertile hills of Cavern, and compelled the new-made Earl to deliver him tribute and hostages. O'Donnell, attended only by a few of his household, was seized in a religious house upon Lachswilly, and subjected to every indignity which an insolent enemy could devise. His countess, already alluded to, supposed to have been privy to this surprise of her husband, became the mistress of his captor and jailer, to whom she bore several children. What deepens the horror of this odious domestic tragedy is the fact that the wife of O'Neill, the daughter of O'Donnell, thus supplanted by her shameless stepmother under her own roof, died soon afterwards of horror, loathing, grief, and deep anguish at the spectacle afforded by the private life of O'Neill, and the severities inflicted upon her wretched father. All the patriotic designs and all the shining abilities of John the Proud cannot abate a jot of our detestation of such a private life. Though slandered in other respects as he was, by hostile pens, no evidence has been adduced to clear his memory of these indelible stains. Nor after becoming acquainted with their existence can we follow his after-career with that heartfelt sympathy with which the lies of purer patriots must always inspire us. The pledge given by Sussex, that the penal legislation of 1560 should lie a dead letter, was not long observed. In May of the year following its enactment, a commission was appointed to enforce the Second Elizabeth in West Mieth, and in 1562 a similar commission was appointed for Mieth and Armog. By these commissioners Dr. William Walsh, Catholic Bishop of Mieth, was arraigned and imprisoned for preaching against the new liturgy. A prelate who afterwards died in exile in Spain. The primantial sea was for the moment vacant, Archbishop Dowdle having died at London three months before Queen Mary, on the Feast of the Assumption 1558. Terence, Dean of Armog, who acted as Administrator, convened a Senate of the English-speaking clergy of the province in July 1559 at Drugheada, but as this dignitary followed in the footsteps of his faithful predecessors, his denary was conferred upon Dr. Adam Loftus, chaplain of the Lord Lieutenant. Two years subsequently the dignity of Archbishop of Armog was conferred upon the same person. Dr. Loftus, a native of Yorkshire, had found favour in the eyes of the Queen at a public exhibition at Cambridge University. He was but twenty-eight years old, according to Sir James Ware, when consecrated primate, but Dr. Mant thinks he must have attained at least the canonical age of thirty. During the whole of this reign he continued to reside at Dublin, which sea was early placed under his jurisdiction in lieu of the inaccessible Armog. For forty years he continued one of the ruling spirits at Dublin, whether acting as Lord Chancellor, Lord Justice, Privy Counselor, or first Provost of Trinity College. He was a pluralist in church and state, insatiable of money and honors. If he did not greatly assist in establishing his religion, he was eminently successful in enriching his family. Having subdued every hostile neighbor and openly assumed the high prerogative of Prince of Ulster, John the Proud looked around him for allies in the greater struggle, which he foresaw could not be long postponed. Calvagh O'Donnell was yielded up on receiving a munificent ransom, but his infamous wife remained with her paramour. A negotiation was set on foot with the chiefs of the Highland and Island Scots, large numbers of whom entered into O'Neill's service. Emissaries were dispatched to the French court, where they found a favourable reception, as Elizabeth was known to be in League with the King of Novar and the Huguenot leaders against Francis II. The unexpected death of the King at the close of 1560, the return of his youthful widow, Queen Mary, to Scotland, the vigorous regency of Catherine de Medici's during the minority of her second son, the ill success of Elizabeth's arms during the campaigns of 1561, II and III, followed by the humiliating peace of April 1564, these events are all to be born in memory when considering the extraordinary relations which were maintained during the same years by the proud Prince of Ulster, with the still prouder Queen of England. The apparently contradictory tactics pursued by the Lord Deputy Sussex between his return to Dublin in the spring of 1561 and his final recall in 1564, when read by the light of events which transpired at Paris, London, and Edinburgh, become easily intelligible. In the spring of the first mentioned year it was thought possible to intimidate O'Neill, so Lord Sussex, with the Earl of Armand as second in command, marched northwards, entered Armagh, and began to fortify the city, with a view to placing it in a powerful garrison. O'Neill, to remove the seat of hostilities, made an eruption into the plain of Mieith and Menace Dublin. The utmost consternation prevailed at his approach, and the deputy, while continuing the fortification of Armagh, dispatched the main body of his troops to press on the rear of the aggressor. By a rapid counter-march O'Neill came up with this force, laden with spoils, in Louth, and after an obstinate engagement routed them with immense loss. On receipt of this intelligence Sussex promptly abandoned Armagh and returned to Dublin, while O'Neill erected his standard as far south as Jugheda, within twenty miles of the capital. So critical at this moment was the aspect of affairs that all the energies of the English interest were taxed to the utmost. In the autumn of the year Sussex marched again from Dublin northward, having at his side the five powerful earls of Kildare, Armand, Desmond, Thoman, and Clanricard, whose mutual feuds had been healed or dissembled for the day. O'Neill prudently fell back before this powerful expedition, which found its way to the shores of Loughfoil, without bringing him to an engagement, and without any military advantage. As the shortest way of getting rid of such an enemy, the Lord Deputy, though one of the wisest and most justly celebrated of Elizabeth's councillors, did not hesitate to communicate to his royal mistress the project of hiring an assassin, named Neil Gray, to take off the Prince of Ulster, but the plot, though carefully elaborated, miscarried. Foreign news, which probably reached him only on reaching the foil, led to a sudden change of tactics on the part of Sussex, and the young Lord Kildare, O'Neill's cousin, German, was employed to negotiate a peace with the enemy they had set out to demolish. This Lord Kildare was Gerald, the eleventh earl, the same whom we have spoken of as a fugitive lad, in the last years of Henry VIII, and as restored to his estates and rank by Queen Mary. Although largely indebted to his catholicy for the protection he had received while abroad, from Francis I, Charles V, the Duke of Tuscany and the Roman Sea, especially the Cardinals' Pole and Farnese, and still more indebted to the late Catholic Queen for the restoration of his family honors, this finished courtier, now in the very mid-summer of life, one of the handsomest and most accomplished persons of his time, did not hesitate to conform himself, at least outwardly, to the religion of the State. Shortly before the campaign of which we have spoken, he had been suspected of treasonable designs, but had pleaded his cause successfully with the Queen in person. From Locke-Foyle, accompanied by the Lord Slane, the Viscount vaulting-glass and a suitable guard, Lord Kildare set out for John O'Neill's camp, where a truce was concluded between the parties, Lord Sussex undertaking to withdraw his wardens from our mog, and O'Neill engaging himself to live in peace with her Majesty, and to serve when necessary against her enemies. The cousins also agreed personally to visit the English court the following year, and accordingly in January ensuing they went to England, from which they returned home in the latter end of May. The reception of John the Proud, at the court of Elizabeth, was flattering in the extreme. The courtier stared and smiled at his bare-headed bodyguard, with their crocus-dyed vests, short jackets, and shaggy cloaks. But the broad-bladed battle-axe and the sinewy arm which wielded it inspired admiration for all the uncouth costume. The haughty indifference with which the Prince of Ulster treated everyone about the court, except the Queen, gave a keener edge to the satirical comments which were so freely indulged in at the expense of his style of dress. The wits proclaimed him O'Neill the Great, cousin to St. Patrick, friend to the Queen of England, and enemy to all the world besides. O'Neill was well pleased with his reception by Elizabeth. When taxed upon his return, with having made peace with Her Majesty, he answered, Yes, in her own bed-chamber. There were indeed many points in common in both their characters. Her Majesty, by letters patent dated at Windsor, on the fifteenth of January, 1563, recognized in John the Proud the name and title of O'Neill, with the like authority, jurisdiction and preeminence as any of his ancestors. And O'Neill, by articles dated at Ben Burb, the eighteenth of November of the same year, recited the letter's patent to Forsed, bound himself and his suffragents to behave as the Queen's good and faithful subjects against all persons whatever. Thus, so far as an English alliance could guarantee it, was the supremacy of this daring chief guaranteed in Ulster from the Boyne to the North Sea. In performing his part of the engagements thus entered into, O'Neill is placed in a less invidious light by English riders than formerly. They now describe him as scrupulously faithful to his word, as charitable to the poor, always carving and sending meat from his own table to the beggar at the gate before eating himself. Of the sincerity with which he carried out the expulsion of the Islemen and the Highlanders from Ulster, the result afforded the most conclusive evidence. It is true he had himself invited those bands into the province to aid him against the very power with which he was now at peace, and therefore they might in their view allege duplicity and desertion against him. Yet enlisted as they usually were but for a single campaign, O'Neill expected them to depart as readily as they had come. But in this expectation he was disappointed. Their leaders, Angus, James, and sorely McDonald, refused to recognize the new relations which had arisen, and O'Neill was, therefore, compelled to resort to force. He defeated the Scottish troops at Glenfesque, near Bally Castle in 1564, in an action wherein Angus McDonald was slain, James died of his wounds, and sorely was carried prisoner to Ben Burb. An English auxiliary force, under Colonel Randolph, sent round by sea, under pretence of cooperating against the Scots, took possession of dairy and began to fortify it. But their leader was slain in a skirmish with a party of O'Neill's people who disliked the fortress, and whether by accident or otherwise their magazine exploded, killing a great part of the garrison and destroying their works. The remnant took to their shipping and returned to Dublin. In the years 1565, 6 and 7, the internal dissensions of both Scotland and France, and the perturbations in the Netherlands giving full occupation to her foreign foes, Elizabeth had an interval of leisure to attend to this dangerous ally in Ulster. A second unsuccessful attempt on his life by an assassin named Smith was traced to the Lord Deputy, and a formal commission issued by the Queen to investigate the case. The result we know only by the event, Sussex was recalled, and Sir Henry Sidney substituted in his place. Death had lately made way in Tyr Connell and Fermanog for new chiefs, and these leaders, more vigorous than their predecessors, were resolved to shake off the recently imposed and sternly exercised supremacy of Ben Burb. With these chiefs, Sidney, at the head of a veteran armament, cordially cooperated, and O'Neill's territory was now attacked simultaneously at three different points, in the year 1566. No considerable success was, however, obtained over him till the following year, when at the very opening of the campaign the brave O'Donnell arrested his march along the strand of the Loch Swilly, and the tide rising impetuously, as it does on that coast, on the rear of the men of Tyrone, struck them with terror, and completed their defeat. From fifteen hundred to three thousand men perished by the sword or by the tide, John the Proud fled alone along the river Swilly, and narrowly escaped by the fords of rivers and by solitary ways to his castle on Loch Nyeg. The analysts of Donegal, who were old enough to have conversed with survivors of the battle, say that his mind became deranged by the sudden fall from the summit of prosperity to the depths of defeat. His next step would seem to establish the fact, for he had once dispatched, sorely MacDonald, the survivor of the battle of Glenfesque, to recruit a new auxiliary force for him amongst the Islemen, whom he had so mortally offended. Then, abandoning his fortress upon the Blackwater, he set out with fifty guards, his secretary, and his mistress, the wife of the late O'Donnell, to meet these expected allies whom he had so fiercely driven off but two short years before. At Cushenden, on the Entrum Coast, they met with all apparent cordiality, but an English agent, Captain Pierce, or Pierce, seized an opportunity during the corrals which ensued to recall the bitter memories of Glenfesque. A dispute and a quarrel ensued, O'Neill fell covered with wounds amid the exulting shouts of the avenging Islemen. His gory head was presented to Captain Pierce, who hastened with it to Dublin, where he received a reward of a thousand marks for his success. High spiked upon the towers of the castle, that proud head remained and rotted. The body, wrapped in a Curran's Saffron's shirt, was interred where he fell, a spot familiar to all the inhabitants of the Entrum Glenfesque as the grave of Shane O'Neill. And so may be said to close the first decade of Elizabeth's reign over Ireland. CHAPTER IV of a popular history of Ireland, Book VIII by Thomas Starcy McGee, read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Sir Henry Sidney's deputyship, Parliament of 1569, the Second Geraldine League, Sir James FitzMaurice. Sir Henry Sidney, in writing to his court, had always reported John O'Neill as the only strong man in Ireland. Before his rout at Loch Swilly, he could commonly call into the field four thousand foot and one thousand horse, and his two years revolt cost Elizabeth in money about one hundred and fifty thousand pounds sterling over and above the cess laid on the country, besides thirty-five hundred of Her Majesty's soldiers slain in battle. The removal of such a leader in the very prime of life was therefore a cause of much congratulation to Sidney and his royal mistress, and as no other strong man was likely soon to arise, the deputy now turned with renewed ardour to the task of establishing the Queen's supremacy, in things spiritual as well as temporal. With this view he urged that separate governments, with large though subordinate military as well as civil powers, should be created for Munster and Cannot, with competent presidents who should reside in the former province at Limerick, and in the latter at Athelone. In accordance with this scheme, which continued to be acted upon for nearly a century, Sir Edward Fitton was appointed First President of Cannot, and Sir John Perot, the Queen's illegitimate brother, President of Munster. Lenster and Ulster were reserved as the special charge of the Lord Deputy. About the time of O'Neill's death Sidney made an official progress through the south and west, which he describes as woefully wasted by war, both town and country. The earldom of the loyal Ormond was far from being well ordered, and the other great nobles were even less favourably reported. The Earl of Desmond could neither rule nor be ruled, the Earl of Clancardy wanted force and credit, the Earl of Thomand had neither wit to govern, nor grace to learn of others. The Earl of Clancard was well intentioned, but controlled holy by his wife. Many districts had but one twentieth of their ancient population. Galway was in a state of perpetual defence. Athenry had but four respectable householders left, and these presented him with the rusty keys of their once famous town, which they confessed themselves unable to defend, impoverished as they were by the extortions of their lords. All this to the eye of the able Englishman had been the result of that cowardly policy, or lack of policy, whose sole maxims had been to play off the great lords against each other and to retard the growth of population, lest, through their quiet, may follow future dangers to the English interest. His own policy was based on very different principles. He proposed to make the highest heads bow to the supremacy of the royal sword, to punish, with exemplary rigor, every sign of insubordination, especially in the great, and at the same time to encourage with ample rewards, adventurers, and enterprises of all kinds. He proposed to himself precisely the part Lord Stafford acted sixty years later, and he entered on it with a will which would have won the admiration of that unbending despot. He prided himself on the number of military executions which marked his progress. Down they go in every corner, he writes, and down they shall go, God willing. He seized the Earl of Desmond in his own town of Kilmalik. He took the sons of Clan Rekard in Canat, and carried them prisoners to Dublin. Elizabeth became alarmed at these extreme measures, and Sidney obtained leave to explain his new policy in person to Her Majesty. Accordingly in October he sailed for England, taking with him the Earl and his brother John of Desmond, who had been invited to Dublin, and were detained as prisoners of state. Hugh O'Neill, as yet known by no other title than Baron of Duncanon, the O'Connor Sligo, and other chiefs and noblemen. He seems to have carried his policy triumphantly with the Queen, and from henceforth, for many a long year, the dull sways and politic drifts recommended by the great cardinal statesmen of Henry VIII were to give way to that remorseless struggle in which the only alternative offered to the Irish was uniformity or extermination. Of this policy Sir Henry Sidney May, it seems to me, be fairly considered the author. Stafford and even Cromwell were but finishers of his work. One cannot repress a sigh that so ferocious a design is the extermination of a whole people should be associated in any degree with the illustrious name of Sidney. The triumphant deputy arrived at Carrick-Fergus in September 1568 from England. Here he received the submission, as it is called, of Tyrlog, the new O'Neill, and turned his steps southwards in full assurance that this chief of Tyrone was not another strong man like the last. A new privy council was sworn in on his arrival at Dublin, with royal instructions to concur with the deputy, and twenty thousand pounds a year in addition to the whole of the sess levied in the country, were guaranteed to enable him to carry out his great scheme of reduction. A parliament was next summoned for the 17th of January 1569, the first assembly of that nature which had been convened since Lord Sussex's rupture with his parliament nine years before. The acts of this parliament, of the 11th of Elizabeth, are much more voluminous than those of the second of the same reign. The constitution of the houses is also of interest, as the earlier records of every form of government must always be. Three sessions were held in the first year, one in 1570, and one in 1571. After its dissolution, no parliament sat in Ireland for fourteen years. So unstable was the system at that time, and so dependent upon accidental causes for its exercise. The first sittings of Sydney's parliament were as stormy as those of Sussex. It was found that many members presented themselves pretending to represent towns not incorporated, and others, officers of election, had returned themselves. Others, again, were non-resident Englishmen, dependent on the deputy who had never seen the places for which they claimed to sit. The disputed elections of all classes being referred to the judges, they decided that non-residents did not disqualify the latter class, but that those who had returned themselves and those chosen for non-corporate towns were inadmissible. This double decision did not give the new house of Commons quite the desired complexion, though Stanahurst, recorder of Dublin, the court candidate, was chosen speaker. The opposition was led by Sir Christopher Barnwell, an able and intrepid man, to whose firmness it was mainly due that a more sweeping prescription was not enacted under form of law at this period. The native Englishmen in the house were extremely unpopular out of doors, and Hooker, one of their number, who sat for the deserted borough of Athenry, had to be escorted to his lodgings by a strong guard for fear of the Dublin mob. The chief acts of the first session were a subsidy for ten years of thirteen shillings fourpence for every plowland granted to the queen, an act suspending Poynings Act for the continuance of that parliament, an act for the attainer of John O'Neill, an act appropriating to her majesty the lands of the Night of the Valley, an act authorizing the Lord Deputy to present to vacant benefits in Munster and Canot for ten years, an act abolishing the title of captain or ruler of counties or districts, unless by special warrant under the great seal, an act for reversing the attainer of the Earl of Keldare. In the sittings of fifteen seventy and seventy-one the chief acts were for the erection of free schools, for the preservation of the public records, for establishing and uniform measure in the sale of corn, and for the attainer of the white knight deceased. Though undoubtedly most of these statutes strengthened Sidney's hands and favored his policy, they did not go the links which in his official correspondence he advocated. For the last seven years of his connection with Irish affairs he was accordingly disposed to dispense with the unmanageable machinery of a parliament. Orders and counsel were much more easily procured than acts of legislation, even when every care had been taken to pack the House of Commons with the dependence of the executive. The meeting of Parliament in fifteen sixty-nine was nearly coincident with the formal excommunication of Elizabeth by Pope Pius V. Though pretending to despise the bull, the queen was weak enough to seek its revocation, through the interposition of the emperor Maximilian. The high tone of the enthusiastic pontiff irritated her deeply, and perhaps the additional severities which she now directed against her Catholic subjects may be in part traced to the effects of the excommunication. In Ireland the work of reformation, by means of civil disabilities and executive patronage, was continued with earnestness. In fifteen sixty-four all Popish priests and friars were prohibited from meeting at Dublin, or even coming within the city gates. Two years later the book of articles, copied from the English articles, was published by order of the commissioners for causes ecclesiastical. The articles are twelve in number. One, the Trinity in unity. Two, the sufficiency of the scriptures to salvation. Three, the orthodoxy of particular churches. Four, the necessity of holy orders. Five, the queen's supremacy. Six, denial of the pope's authority to be more than other bishops have. Seven, the conformity of the book of common prayer to the scriptures. Eight, the ministration of baptism does not depend on the ceremonial. Nine, condemns private masses and denies that the mass can be a propitiatory sacrifice for the dead. Ten, asserts the propriety of communion in both kinds. Eleven, utterly disallows images, relics, and pilgrimages. Twelve, requires a general description to the foregoing articles. With this creed the Irish establishment started into existence, at the command and, of course, with all the aid of the civil power. The bishops of Mieeth and Kildare, the nearest to Dublin, for resisting it were banished their seas, the former to die in exile in Spain, the latter to find refuge and protection with the Earl of Desmond. Several prelates were tolerated in their seas, on condition of preserving a species of neutrality, but all vacancies, if within the reach of the English power, were filled as they occurred by nominees of the Crown. Those who actively and energetically resisted the new doctrines were marked out for vengeance, and we shall see in the next decade how Ireland's martyr age began. The honour and danger of organising resistance to the progress of the new religion now devolved upon the noble family of the Geraldines of Munster, of whose principal members we must therefore give some account. The fifteenth Earl, who had concurred in the act of Henry's election, died in the year of Elizabeth's Assession, 1558, leaving three sons, Gerald the sixteenth Earl, John, and James. He had also an elder son by a first wife, from whom he had been divorced on the ground of consequently. This son disputed this Assession unsuccessfully, retired to Spain, and there died. Earl Gerald, though one of the peers who sat in the Parliament of the Second Year of Elizabeth, was one of those who strenuously opposed the policy of Sussex, and still more strenuously, as may be supposed, the more extreme policy of Sydney. His reputation, however, as a leader, suffered severely by the combat of Féin, in which he was taken prisoner by Thomas, the tenth Earl of Ormond, with whom he was at feud on a question of boundaries. By order of the Queen, the former deputy was appointed arbitrator in this case, and though the decision was in favour of Ormond, Desmond submitted, came to Dublin, and was reconciled with his enemy in the chapter-house of St. Patrick's. A year or two later, Gerald turned his arms against the ancient rivals of his house, the McCarthy's of Muscarey and Dunhello, but was again taken prisoner, and after six months' detention, held to ransom by the Lord of Muscarey. After his release, the old feud with Ormond broke out anew, a most impolite quarrel, as that Earl was not only personally a favourite with the Queen, but was also nearly connected with her in blood through the Bolins. In 1567, as before related, Desmond was seized by surprise in his town of Kilmalloch by Sydney's order, and the following autumn conveyed to London on a charge of treason and lodged in the tower. This was the third prison he had lodged in within three years, and by far the most hopeless of the three. His brother, Sir John of Desmond, through the representations of Ormond, was the same year arrested and consigned to the same ominous dungeon, from which suspected noblemen seldom emerged except when the hurdle waited for them at the gate. This double capture aroused the indignation of all the tribes of Desmond, and led to the formidable combination which, in reference to the previous confederacy in the reign of Kerry, may be called the Second Geraldine League. The Earl of Clancardi and such of the O'Brien's, McCarthy's and Butler's, as had resolved to resist the complete revolution in property, religion, and law, which Sydney meditated, united together to avenge the wrongs of those noblemen, their neighbours, so treacherously arrested and so cruelly confined. Sir James, son of Sir Maurice Fitzgerald of Kerry, commonly called James FitzMaurice, cousin Germain to the imprisoned noblemen, was chosen leader of the insurrection. He was, according to the testimony of an enemy, Hooker, member for Athenry, a deep dissembler, passing, subtle, and able to compass any matter he took in hand, courteous, valiant, expert in martial affairs. To this we may add that he had already reached a mature age, was deeply and sincerely devoted to his religion, and according to the eulogist of the rival house of Ormond, one whom nothing could deject or bow down, a scornor of luxury and ease, insensible to danger, impervious to the elements, preferring, after hard days fighting, the bare earth to a luxurious couch. One of the first steps of the league was to dispatch an embassy for assistance to the King of Spain and the Pope. The Archbishop of Casual, the Bishop of Emily and James, the youngest brother of Desmond, were appointed on this mission, of which Sidney was no sooner apprised than he proclaimed the Confederates traitors, and at once prepared for a campaign in Munster. The first blow was struck by the taking of Claude Grenin Castle, which belonged to Sir Edmund Butler, one of the adherents of the league. The attack was led by Sir Peter Carew, an English adventurer, who had lately appeared at Dublin to claim the original grant made to Robert Fitz-Steven of the Moiety of the Kingdom of Cork, and who at present commanded the garrison of Kilkenny. The accomplished soldier of fortune anticipated the deputies movements by this blow at the Confederated Butlers, who retaliated by an abortive attack on Kilkenny, and a successful foray into Wexford, in which they took the castle of Enescorthy. Sidney, taking the field in person, marched through Waterford and Dungarvin against Desmond's strongholds in the vicinity of Yughal. After a week's siege he took Castle Martyr, and continued his route through Barrymore to Cork, where he established his headquarters. From Cork, upon receiving the submission of some timid members of the league, he continued his route to Limerick, where Sir Edmund Butler and his brothers were induced to come in by their chief, the Earl of Ormond. From Limerick he penetrated Clair, took the castles of Clannoun and Balivon, he next halted some time at Galway and returned to Dublin by Athelon. Overon by the activity of the deputy, many others of the Confederates followed the example of the Butlers. The Earl of Clancardy sued for pardon and delivered up his eldest son as a hostage for his good faith. The Earl of Thomond, more suspected than compromised, yielded all his castles, with the sole exception of Ibracan. But the next year mortified at the insignificance to which he had reduced himself, he sought refuge in France, from which he only returned when the intercession of the English ambassador, Norris, had obtained him full indemnity for the past. Sir James FitzMaurice, thus deserted by his Confederates, had need of all the unyielding firmness of character for which he had obtained credit. Castle after Castle belonging to his cousins and himself was taken by the powerful siege trains of President Perot. Castle Main, the last stronghold which commanded an outlet by sea, surrendered after a three-month siege, gallantly maintained. The unyielding leader had now, therefore, no alternative but to retire to the impregnable passes of the Galtese, where he established his headquarters. This mountain range, towering from two to three thousand feet over the plain of Ormond, stretches from northwest to southeast some twenty miles, descending with many a gentle undulation towards the Funchian and the Blackwater in the earldom of Desmond. Of all its valleys a harlot was the fairest and most secluded. Well wooded and well watered, with outlets and intricacies known only to the native population, it seemed as if designed for a nursery of insurrection. It now became to the Patriots of the South what the Valley of Glen Malure had long been for those of Lentster, a fortress dedicated by nature to the defense of freedom. In this fastness Fitzmaurice continued to maintain himself until a prospect of new combinations opened to him in the west. The sons of the earl of Clan Ricard, though released from the custody of Sydney, receiving intimation that they were to be arrested at a court which fit in, president of Cannot, had summoned at Galway, flew to arms and opened negotiations with Fitzmaurice. The latter, withdrawing from a harlot, promptly joined them in Galway, and during the campaign which followed, aided them with his iron energy and sagacious counsel. They took and demolished the works of Athenry, and in part those of the Court of Athelone. Their successes induced the deputy to liberate Clan Ricard himself, who had been detained a prisoner in Dublin from the outbreak of his sons. On his return, their main object being attained, they submitted as promptly as they had revolted, and this hope also being quenched, Fitzmaurice found his way back again, with a hand full of Scottish retainers, to the shelter of a harlot. Sir John Perot, having by this time no further sieges to prosecute, drew his toils closer and closer round the Geraldine's retreat. For a whole year the fidelity of his adherents and the natural strength of the place enabled him to baffle all the president's efforts. But his faithful Scottish guards, being at length surprised and cut off almost to a man, Fitzmaurice, with his son, his kinsmen, the son-a-shall of Immokili, and the son of Richard Berg, surrendered to the president of Kilmalik, suing on his knees for the queen's pardon, which was, for motives of policy, granted. On this conclusion of the contest in Munster, the Earl of Desmond and his brother, Sir John, were released from the tower, and transferred to Dublin, where they were treated as prisoners on parole. The mayor of the city, who was answerable for their custody, having taken them upon a hunting party in the open country, the brothers put spurs to their horses and escaped into Munster, fifteen seventy-four. They were stigmatized as having broken their parole, but they asserted that it was intended on that party to waylay and murder them, and that their only safety was in flight. Large rewards were offered for their capture, alive or dead, but the necessities of both parties compelled a truce during the remainder of Sidney's official career, which terminated in his resignation about four years after the escape of the Desmonds from Dublin. Thus were the new elements of combination, at the moment least expected, thrown into the hands of the Munster Catholics. The Undertakers in Ulster and Lentster Defeat and Death of Sir James Fitzmarice Queen Elizabeth, when writing to Lord Sussex of a rumored rising by O'Neill, desired him to assure her leges at Dublin that if O'Neill did rise, it would be for their advantage, for there will be estates for them who want. The Sidney policy of treating Ireland as a discovered country whose inhabitants had no right to the soil, except such as the discoverers graciously conceded to them, begat a new order of men, unknown to the history of other civilized states, which order we must now be at some pains to introduce to the reader. These Undertakers, as they were called, differed widely from the Norman invaders of a former age. The Norman generally espoused the cause of some native chief, and took his pay in land. What he got by the sword he held the sword. But the Undertaker was usually a man of peace, a courtier like Sir Christopher Hatton, a politician like Sir Walter Raleigh, a poet like Edmund Spencer, or a spy and forger like Richard Boyle, first Earl of Cork. He came in the wake of war with his elastic letters patent, or if he served in the field it was mainly with a view to the subsequent confiscations. He was adroit at finding flaws in ancient titles, skilled in all the brutal quibbles of fine and recovery, and ready to employ the secret dagger where hard-swearing and fabricated documents might fail to make good his title. Sometimes men of higher mark and more generous dispositions, allured by the temptations of the social revolution, would enter on the same pursuits. But they generally miscarried from want of what was then cleverly called subtlety, but which plain people could not easily distinguish from lying and perjury. What assisted them in their designs was the fact that feudal tenures had never been general in Ireland, so that by an easy process of reasoning they could prove nineteen-twentieths of all existing titles defective, according to their notions of the laws of property. Sir Peter Carew, already mentioned, was one of the earliest of the undertakers. He had been bred up as a page to the Prince of Orange, and had visited the courts of France, Germany, and Constantinople. He claimed by virtue of his consent from Robert Fitz-Steven, the barony of Idrone in Carlo, and one-half the Kingdom of Desmond. Sir Henry Sidney had admitted these pretensions partly as a menace against the Kavanaugh's and Geraldine's, and Sir Peter established himself at Leglin, where he kept Great House, with one hundred servants, over one hundred cairn, forty horse, a stall in his stable, a seat at his board for all comers. He took an active part in all military operations, and fell fighting gallantly on a memorable day to be hereafter mentioned. After the attainer of John the Proud in fifteen-sixty-nine, Sir Thomas Smith, Secretary to the Queen, obtained a grant of the District of the Ards of Down, for his illegitimate son, who accordingly entered on the task of its plantation. But the O'Neill's of Clandiboy, the owners of the soil, attacked the young undertaker, who met a grave where he had come to found a lordship. A higher name was equally unfortunate in the same field of adventure. Walter Devereaux, Earl of Essex, father of the Essex still more unfortunate, obtained in fifteen seventy-three a grant of one moiety of Farny in Clandiboy, and having mortgaged his English estates to the Queen for ten thousand pounds, associated with himself many other adventurers. On the sixteenth of August he set sail from Liverpool, accompanied by the Lord's Dacre and Rich, Sir Henry Nullis, the three sons of Lord Norris, and a multitude of the common people. But as he had left one powerful enemy at court in Leicester, so he found a second at Dublin in the acting deputy Fitzwilliam. Though gratified with the title of President of Ulster, and afterwards that of Marshal of Ireland, he found his schemes constantly counteracted by orders from Dublin or from England. He was frequently ordered off from his headquarters at Nury, on expeditions into Munster, until those who had followed his banner became disheartened in muteness. The O'Neill's and the Antrim Scots harassed his colony and increased his troubles. He attempted by treachery to revive his fortunes. Having invited the alliance of Con O'Donnell, he seized that chief and sent him prisoner to Dublin. Subsequently his chief opponent, Brian, Lord of Clandiboy, paid him an amicable visit, accompanied by his wife, brother, and household. As they receded at table on the fourth day of their stay, the soldiers of Essex burst into the banquet hall, put them all, women, youths, and maidens, to the sword. Brian and his wife were saved from the slaughter only to undergo at Dublin the death and mutilation inflicted upon traitors. Yet the ambitious schemes of Walter of Essex did not prosper the more of all these crimes. He died at Dublin two years afterwards, fifteen seventy-six, in the thirty-sixth year of his age, as was generally believed from poison administered by the orders of the arch-poisoner, Lester, who immediately upon his death married his widow. It is apparent that the interest of the undertakers could not be to establish peace in Ireland so long as war might be profitably waged. The new English interest thus created was often hostile to the soundest rules of policy, and always opposed to the dictates of right and justice. But the double desire to conquer and to convert, to anglicise and Protestantize, blinded many to the lawless means by which they were worked out. The massacre of four hundred persons of the chief families of Lex and Offaly, which took place at Mulligamast in fifteen seventy-seven, is an evidence of how the royal troops were to promote the ends of the undertakers. To Mulligamast, one of the ancient wraths of Ledster, situated about five miles from Athean Kildare, the Omors, O'Kelly's, Lallors, and other Irish tribes were invited by the local commander of the Queen's troops, Francis Cosby. The Bowens, Hartpoles, Pigots, Hovendons, and other adventurers who had grants or designs upon the neighbouring territory were invited to meet them. One of the Lallors, perceiving that none of those who entered the wrath before him emerged again, caused his friends to fall back while he himself advanced alone. At the very entrance he beheld the dead bodies of some of his slaughtered kinsmen. Drawing his sword, he fought his way back to his friends, who barely escaped with their lives to Dysart. Four hundred victims, including one hundred and eighty of the name of Omor, are said to have fallen in this deliberate butchery. Rory Omor, the chief of his name, avenged this massacre by many a daring deed. In rapid succession he surprised Nath, Athe, and Lakelyn. From the rapidity with which his blows were struck in Kildare, Carlow, and Kilkenny, he appeared to be ubiquitous. He was the true type of a guerrilla leader, yet merciful as brave. While Nath was burning he sat coolly at the market-cross, enjoying the spectacle, but he suffered no lives to be taken. Having captured Cosby, he did not, as might be expected, put him to death. His confidence in his own prowess and resources amounted to rashness, and finally caused his death. Coming forth from a wood to parley with a party of the Queen's troops led by his neighbor, the Lord of Ossary, a common soldier ran him through the body with a sword. This was on the last day of June, fifteen seventy eight, a day mournful through all the Midland districts for the loss of their best and bravest captain. While these events occupied the minds and tongues of men in the North and East, a brief respite from the horrors of war was permitted to the province of Munster. The Earl of Desmond, only too happy to be tolerated in the possession of his five hundred and seventy thousand acres, was eager enough to testify his allegiance by any sort of service. His brothers, though less compliant, followed his example for the moment, and no danger was to be apprehended in that quarter except from the indomitable James Fitzmaurice, self-exiled on the continent. No higher tribute could be paid to the character of that heroic man than the closeness with which all his movements were watched by English spies specially set upon his track. They followed him to the French court, to St. Malo's, where he resided for some time with his family, to Madrid, whence he sent his two sons to the famous University of Alcala and from Madrid to Rome. The honourable reception he received at the hands of the French and Spanish sovereigns was duly reported, yet both being at peace with England his plans elicited no open encouragement from either. At Rome, however, he obtained some material and much moral support. Here he found many zealous advocates among the English and Irish refugees, among them the celebrated Saunders, Alien, sometimes called Cardinal Alien, and Olmulrian, Bishop of Killaloe. A force of about one thousand men was enlisted at the expense of Pope Gregory XIII in the Papal States, and placed under an experienced captain, Hercules Pizzano. They were shipped at Civitavecchia by a squadron under the command of Thomas Stucly, an English adventurer who had served both for and against the Irish Catholics, but had joined Fitzmorris in Spain and accompanied him to Rome. On the strength of some remote or pretended relationship to the McMurrows, Stucly obtained from the Pope the titles of Marquis of Lenster and Baron of a Drone in Ross, at Fitzmorris's urgent request, so it is stated, he was named Vice Admiral of the Fleet. The whole expedition was fitted out at the expense of the Pope, but it was secretly agreed that it should be supported after leaving in Ireland at the charge of Philip II. Fitzmorris, travelling overland to Spain, was to unite there with another party of adventurers and to form a junction with Stucly and Pizzano on the coast of Cary. So with the papal benediction gladdening his heart and a most earnest exhortation from the Holy Father to the Catholics of Ireland to follow his banner, this noblest of all the Catholic Geraldines departed from Rome to try again the hazard of war in his own country. This was in the spring of the year 1579. Sir Henry Sidney, after many years' direction of the government, had been recalled at his own request. Sir William Drury was acting as Lord Justice and Sir Nicholas Malby as President of Munster. Expectation of the return of Fitzmorris, at the head of a liberating expedition, began to be rife throughout the south and west, and the coasts were watched with the utmost vigilance. In the month of June three persons having landed in disguise from a Spanish ship at Dingle were seized by government spies and carried before the Earl of Desmond. On examination one of them proved to be O'Hally, Bishop of Mayo, and another a friar named O'Rourke, the third is not named.  After their thighs had been broken with hammers they were hanged on a tree and their bodies used as targets by the brutal soldiery. Fitzmorris, with his friends having survived shipwrecked on the coast of Galicia, entered the same harbor, Dingle, on the 17th of July. But no tidings had yet reached Munster of Stuccole and Pizzano and his cousin the Earl sent him neither sign of friendship nor promise of cooperation. He therefore brought his vessels round to the small harbor of Smerick and commenced fortifying the almost isolated rock of Ullin-Enore, or Golden Island, so called from the shipwreck at that point of one of Martin Forbisher's vessels, laden with golden quartz some years before. Here he was joined by John and James of Desmond and by a band of two hundred of the O'Flarities of Galway, the only allies who presented themselves.  These desperate circumstances inspired desperate councils and it was decided by the cousins to endeavor to gain the great wood of Kilmore near Charleville, in the neighborhood of Sir James's old retreat among the Galty Mountains. In this march they were closely pursued by the Earl of Desmond, either in earnest or in sham, and were obliged to separate into three small bands, the brothers of the Earl retiring respectively to the fastnesses of Linnemore and Glenfesque, while Fitzmaurice, with a dozen horsemen and a few cairn, made a desperate push to reach the western side of the Shannon, where he hoped, perhaps, for better opportunity in a warmer reception. This proved for him a fatal adventure. Jaded after a long day's ride, he was compelled to seize some horses from the plow in the barony of Clan William in order to remount his men. These horses were the property of his relative, Sir William Burke, who with his neighbor, Mac Ibrahim of Ara, pursued the fugitives to within six miles of Linnemore, where Fitzmaurice, having turned to remonstrate with his pursuers, was fired at and mortally wounded. He did not instantly fall. Dashing into the midst of his assailants, he cleft down the two sons of Burke, whose followers immediately turned and fled. Then, alighting from his saddle, the wounded chief received the last solemn rites of religion from the hands of Dr. Allen. His body was decapitated by one of his followers that the noble head might not be subjected to indignity, but the trunk being but hastily buried was soon afterwards discovered, carried to kill Malick, and there hung up for a target and a show. This tragical occurrence took place near the present side of Barrington's Bridge, on the Little River Milkern, county of Limerick, on the eighteenth day of August, fifteen seventy-nine. In honor of his part in the transaction, William Burke was created baron of Castle Connell, awarded a pension of one hundred marks per annum, and received from Elizabeth an autographed letter of condolence on the loss of his sons. It is added by some writers that he died of joy on the receipt of so many favors. Such was the fate of the glorious hopes of Sir James Fitzmaurice. So ended in a squabble with churls about cattle, on the banks of an insignificant stream, a career which had drawn the attention of Europe, and had inspired with apprehension the lion-hearted As to the expedition under Stuccole, its end was even more romantic. His squadron, having put into the Tagus, he found the king of Portugal, Don Sebastian, on the eve of sailing against the Moors, and from some promise of after-aid was induced to accompany that chivalrous prince. On the fatal field of Alcacar, Stuccole, Pizzano, and the Italians under their command, shared the fate of the Portuguese monarch and army. Neither Italy nor Ireland heard of them more. Gregory XIII did not abandon the cause. On the receipt of all these ill tidings he issued another bull, highly laudatory of the virtues of James Fitzmaurice, of happy memory, and granting the same indulgence to those who would fight under John or James of Desmond, as that which was imparted to those who fought against the Turks for the recovery of the Holy Land. This remarkable document is dated from Rome, the 13th of May 1580. We must continue to read the history of Ireland by the light of foreign affairs, and our chief light at this period is derived from Spain. The death of Don Sebastian concentrated the thoughts of Philip II on Portugal, which he forcibly annexed to the Spanish Crown. The progress of the insurrection in the Netherlands also occupied so large a place in his attention that his projects against Elizabeth were postponed year after year to the bitter disappointment of the Irish leaders. It may seem far fetched to assert, but it is not the less certainly true, that the fate of Catholic Munster was intimately involved in the change of masters in Portugal and the fluctuations of war in the Netherlands. The undertakers, who had set their hearts on having the Desmond Estates, determined that the Earl and his brothers should not live long in peace, however peaceably they might be disposed. The old trick of forging letters, already alluded to, grew into a common and familiar practice during this and the following reign. Such a letter, purporting to be written by the Earl of Desmond, at that period only too anxious to be allowed to live in peace, was made public at Dublin and London. It was addressed to Sir William Pelham, the Temporary Lord Justice, and among other passages contained this patent invention, that he, the Earl and his brethren, had taken this matter in hand with great authority, both from the Pope's Holiness and King Philip, who do undertake to further us in our affairs, as we shall need. It is utterly incredible that any man in Desmond's position could have written such a letter, could have placed in the hands of his enemies a document, which must forever debar him from entering into terms with Elizabeth or her representatives in Ireland. We have no hesitation, therefore, in classing this pretended letter to Pelham, with those admitted forgeries which drove the unfortunate Lord Thomas Fitzgerald into premature revolt, in the reign of Henry VIII. Sir John of Desmond had been nominated by the gallant Fitz Maurice in his last moments as the fittest person to rally the remaining defenders of religion and property in Munster. The papal standard and benediction were almost all he could bequeath to his successor, but the energy of John, aided by some favourable local occurrences, assembled a larger force for the campaign of 1579, than had lately taken the field. Without the open aid of the Earl he contrived to get together at one time as many as two thousand men, amongst whom not the least active officer was his younger brother, Sir James, hardly yet of man's age. Doctors Saunders and Allen, with several Spanish officers, accompanied this devoted but undisciplined multitude, sharing all the hardships of the men and the councils of the chiefs. Their first camp, and so to speak, the nursery of their army, was among the inaccessible mountains of Slivloger and Kerry, where the rudiments of discipline were daily inculcated. When they considered the time right for action they removed their camp to the great wood of Kilmore, near Charleville, from which they might safely assail the line of communication between Cork and Limerick, the main depots of Elizabeth's southern army. Nearly half way between these cities, and within a few miles of their new encampment, stood the strong town of Kilmalloc on the Little River Lupec. This famous old Geraldine borough, the focus of several roads, was the habitual stopping-place of the deputies in their progress, as well as of English soldiers on their march. The ancient fortifications, almost obliterated by Fitzmarie's eleven years before, had been replaced by strong walls, lined with earthworks, and crowned by towers. Here Sir William Drury fixed his headquarters in the spring of 1579, summoning to his aid all the Queen's Leages in Munster. With a force of not less than one thousand English regulars under his own command, and perhaps twice that number under the banner of the Munster undertakers and others, who obeyed the summons, he made an unsuccessful attempt to beat up the Geraldine Quarters at Kilmore. One division of his force, consisting of three hundred men by the Irish, and two hundred by the English account, was cut to pieces, with their captains, Herbert, Price, and Eustace. The remainder retreated in disorder to their camp at Athnesi, afford on the Morning Star River, four hundred miles east of Kilmalloc. For nine weeks Drury continued in the field, without gaining any advantage, yet so harassed day and night by his assailants that his health gave way under his anxieties. Despairing of recovery he was removed by slow stages to Waterford, which would seem to indicate that his communications both with Cork and Limerick were impracticable, but died before reaching the first mentioned city. The chief command in Munster now devolved upon Sir Nicholas Malby, an officer who had seen much foreign service, while the temporary vacancy in the government was filled by the council at Dublin, whose choice fell on Sir William Pelham, another distinguished military man, lately arrived from England. Throughout the summer and autumn months the war was maintained, with varying fortune on either side. In the combats of Gortnattabrid and Enigbeg in Limerick, the final success, according to Irish accounts, was with the Oldeens, though they had the misfortune to lose Cardinal Allen, Sir Thomas Fitzgerald, and Sir Thomas Brown. Retiring into winter quarters at Aerithlow they had a third engagement with the garrison of Kilmalloch, which attempted, without success, to intercept their march. The campaign of 1580 was, however, destined to be decisive. Sir John of Desmond, being invited to an amicable conference by the Lord Barry, was entrapped by an English force under Captain Zouch, in the woods surrounding Castle Lyons, and put to death on the spot. The young Sir James had previously been captured on a foray into Muscarey, and executed at Cork, so that of the brothers there now remained but Earl Gerald, the next victim of the machinations which had already proved so fatal to his family. Perceiving at length the true designs cherished against him, the Earl took the field in the spring of 1580, and obtained two considerable advantages, one at Peefield, against the English under Roberts, and a second at Knot Grafin, against the Anglo-Irish, under the brothers of the Earl of Ormond, the recusant members of the original league. Both these actions were fought in Tipperary, and raised anew the hopes of the Munster Catholics. An unsuccessful attempt on Adair was the only other military event in which the Earl bore a part. He wintered in Aerithlow, where his Christmas was rather that of an outlaw than of the Lord Palantine of Desmond. In a Harlow he had the misfortune to lose the gifted and heroic Nuncio, Dr. Saunders, whose great services at that period, taken together with those of Cardinal Allen, long endeared the faithful English to the faithful Irish Catholics. The sequel of the Second Geraldine League may be rapidly narrated. In September 1580 the fort at Smerick, where Fitz-Maurice had landed from Lithia, received a garrison of eight hundred men, chiefly Spaniards and Italians, under Don Stephen San Joseph. The place was instantly invested by sea and land, under the joint command of the new lieutenant, Lord Grey de Wilton, and the Earl of Ormond. Among the officers of the besieging force were three especially notable men, Sir Walter Raleigh, the poet Spencer and Hugh O'Neill, afterwards Earl of Tyrone, but at this time commanding a squadron of cavalry for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth. San Joseph surrendered the place on conditions. That savage outrage ensued which is known in Irish history as the massacre of Smerick. Raleigh and Wingfield appear to have directed the operations by which eight hundred prisoners of war were cruelly butchered and flung over the rocks. The sea upon that coast is deep and the tide swift, but it has not proved deep enough to hide that horrid crime or to wash the stains of such wanton bloodshed from the memory of its authors. For four years longer the Geraldine League flickered in the south, proclamations offering pardon to all concerned except Earl Gerald and a few of his most devoted adherents had their effect. Deserted at home and cut off from foreign assistance, the condition of Desmond grew more and more intolerable. On one occasion he narrowly escaped capture by rushing with his countess into a river and remaining concealed up to the chin in water. His dangers can hardly be paralleled by those of Bruce after the Battle of Falkirk or by the more familiar adventures of Charles Edward. At length on the night of the eleventh of November, fifteen eighty-four, he was surprised with only two followers in a lonesome valley about five miles distance from Trolley among the mountains of Cary. The spot is still remembered and the name of the Earl's Road transports the fancy of the traveller to that tragical scene. Cowering over the embers of a half-extinct fire in a miserable hovel the Lord of a country which in time of peace had yielded an annual rental of forty thousand golden pieces was dispatched by the hands of common soldiers without pity or time or hesitation. A few followers watching their cruts or herds farther up the valley found his bleeding trunk flung out upon the highway. The head was transported overseas to rot upon the spikes of London Tower. The extirpation of the Munster Geraldine's in the right line according to the theory of the undertakers and the Court of England in general vested in the Queen the five hundred and seventy thousand acres belonging to the late Earl. Proclamation was accordingly made throughout England inviting younger brothers of good families to undertake the plantation of Desmond, each planter to obtain a certain scope of land on condition of settling there upon so many families, none of the native Irish to be admitted. Under these conditions Sir Christopher Hatton took up ten thousand acres in Waterford, Sir Walter Raleigh twelve thousand acres partly in Waterford and partly in Cork, Sir William Harbert or Herbert thirteen thousand acres in Cary, Sir Edward Denney six thousand in the same county, Sir Warham, St. Ledger and Sir Thomas Norris six thousand acres each in Cork, Sir William Courtney ten thousand acres in Limerick, Sir Edward Fitton eleven thousand five hundred acres in Tipperary in Waterford and Edmund Spencer a modest three thousand acres in Cork on the beautiful black water. The other notable undertakers were the Hyde's, Butcher's, Worth's, Berkley's, Trenchard's, Thornton's, Butcher's, Billingsley's, et cetera, et cetera. Some of these grants, especially Raleigh's, fell in the next reign to the ravening maw of Richard Boyle, the so called Great Earl of Cork, probably the most pious hypocrite to be found in the long role of the Munster Undertakers. Before closing the present chapter we must present to the reader, in a formal manner, the personage whose career is to occupy the chief remaining part of the present book, Hugh O'Neill, best known by the title of Earl of Tyrone. We have seen him in the camp of the enemies of his country, learning the art of war on the shores of Dingle Bay, a witness to the horrors perpetrated at Smerrick. We may find him later in the same war, in fifteen eighty-four, serving under Perot and Norris, along the foil and the band, for the expulsion of the Antrim Scots. The following year, for these and other good services, he received the patent of the earldom originally conferred on his grandfather, Con O'Neill, but suffered to sink into abeyance by the less politic, John the Proud, in the days when he made his peace with the Queen. The next year he obtained from his Klansmen the still-hire title of O'Neill, and thus he contrived to combine, in his own person, every principle of authority likely to ensure him following an obedience, whether among the Klansmen of Tyrone or the Townsmen upon its borders. O'Neill's last official act of cooperation with the Dublin government may be considered his participation in the Parliament convoked by Sir John Perot, in fifteen eighty-five, and prorogued till the following year. It is remarkable of this Parliament, the third and last of Elizabeth's long reign, that it was utterly barren of ecclesiastical legislation, if we accept an act against sorcery and witchcraft from that category. The attainer of the late Earl of Desmond, and the living vicount of balting glass, in arms with the O'Burns and Glenmalure, are the only measures of consequence to be found among the Irish statutes of the twenty-seventh and twenty-eight of Elizabeth. But though not remarkable for its legislation, the Parliament of fifteen eighty-five is conspicuously so for its composition. Within its walls, with the piers, knights, and burgesses of the Anglicised Counties, sat almost all the native chiefs of Ulster, Canot, and Munster. The Lenster chiefs recently in arms, in alliance with the Earl of Desmond, generally absented themselves, with the exception of Fagg, son of Hugh, the senior of the O'Burns, and one of the noblest spirits of his race and age. He appears not to have had a seat in either house, but attended on his own business under the protection of his powerful friends and surities. BATTLE OF GLENMALURE In pursuing to its close the war in Munster, we were obliged to omit the mention of an affair of considerable importance, which somewhat consoled the Catholics for the massacre at Smerick and the defeat of the Desmins. We have already observed what a harlot was to the southern insurgents, the deep, secluded valley of Glenmalure was to the oppressed of Lenster. It afforded, at this period, refuge to a nobleman whose memory has been most improperly allowed to fall into oblivion. This was James Eustis, the Viscount balting-glass, who had suffered imprisonment in the castle for refusing to pay an illegal tax of a few pounds, who was afterwards made the object of a special vindictive enactment known as the Statute of Baltinglass, and was in the summer of 1580, on his keeping, surrounded by armed friends and retainers. His friend, Sir Walter Fitzgerald, son-in-law to the Chief of Glenmalure, and many of the clansmen of Lex, Offaly, and Idrone, repaired him, at Sliverow, near the modern village of Blessington, from which they proceeded to form a junction with the followers of the Dauntless Feg-McHugh O'Burn of Balancourt. Lord Grey of Wilton, on reaching Dublin in August of that year, obtained information of this gathering, and determined to strike a decisive blow in Wicklow, before proceeding to the south. All the Chief Captains in the Queen's Service, the Malbees, Dudleys, Cosbees, Carous, Moors, had repaired to meet him at Dublin, and now marched under his command into the neighboring Highlands. The Catholics they knew were concentrated in the Valley, on one of the slopes of which Lord Grey constructed a strong camp, and then, having selected the fittest troops for the service, gave orders to attack the Irish camp. Sir William Stanley, one of the officers in command, well describes the upshot in a letter to Secretary Walsingham. When we entered the Glen, he writes, we were forced to slide, sometimes three or four fathoms, ere we could stay our feet. It was in depth, where we entered at least a mile, full of stones, rocks, logs, and wood, in the bottom thereof a full river of loose stones, which we were driven across diverse times. Before we were half through the Glen, which is four miles in length, the enemy charged us very hotly. It was the hottest piece of service that I ever saw, for the time in any place. As might have been expected, the assailants were repulsed with heavy loss. Among the slain were Sir Peter Carew, Colonel Francis Cosby of Mulligmask Memory, Colonel Moore, and other distinguished officers. The full extent of the defeat was concealed from Elizabeth, as well as it could be, in the official dispatches, but before the end of August, private letters, such as we have quoted, conveyed the painful intelligence to the court. The action was fought on the fifth day of August. Lord Gray's deputieship, though it lasted only two years, included the three decisive campaigns in the south already described. At the period of his recall, or leave of absence, the summer of 1582, that most populous and plentiful country, to use the forcible language of his eloquent secretary, Edmund Spencer, was reduced to a heap of carcasses and ashes. The war had been truly a war of extermination, nor did the monster recover her due proportion of the population of the island for nearly two centuries afterwards. The appointment of Sir John Perot dates from 1583, though he did not enter on the duties of Lord Deputy till the following year. Like most of the public men of that age, he was both soldier and statesman. In temper he resembled his reputed father, Henry VIII, for he was impatient of contradiction and control, fond of expense and beneficence, with a high opinion of his own abilities for diplomacy and legislation. The Parliament of 1585 to 6, as it was attended by almost every notable man in the kingdom, was one of his boasts, though no one seems to have benefited by it much, except Hugh O'Neill, whose title of Earl of Tyrone was then formally recognized. Subordinate to Perot, the office of Governor of Cannot was held by Sir Richard Bingham, founder of the fortunes of the present earls of Lucan, and that of President of Munster by Sir Thomas Norris, one of four brothers, all employed in the Queen Service, and all destined to lose their lives in that employment. The most important events which marked the four years administration of Perot were the pacification of Thomond and Cannot, the capture of Hugh Rowe O'Donnell, and the wreck of a large part of the Spanish Armada on the northern and western coasts. The Royal Commission issued for the first mentioned purpose exemplifies, in a striking manner, the exigencies of Elizabeth's policy at that moment. The persons entrusted with its execution were Sir Richard Bingham, the earls of Thomond and Clan Ricard, Sir Terlo O'Brien, Sir Richard Bork, the McWilliam, O'Connor Sligo, Sir Brian O'Rourke, and Sir Murrow O'Flaherty. The chief duties of this singular commission were to fix the money rental for all lands, free and unfree, in Clare and Cannot, to assess the taxation fairly due to the crown also in money, and to substitute generally the English law of secession for the ancient customs of tannistry and gavelkind. In Clare, from fortuitous causes, the settlement they arrived at was never wholly reversed. In Cannot, the inhuman severity of Bingham rendered it odious from the first, and the successes of Hugh Rowe O'Donnell a few years later were hailed by the people of that province as a heaven-sent deliverance. The treacherous capture of this youthful chieftain was one of the skillful devices on which Sir John Perot most prided himself. Although a mere lad, the mysterious language of ancient prophecy, which seemed to point him out for greatness, gave him consequence in the eyes of both friends and foes. Through his heroic mother, a daughter of the Lord of the Isles, he would naturally find allies in that warlike race. His precocious prowess and talents began to be noise to broad, and stimulated Perot to the employment of an elaborate artifice, which, however, proved quite successful. A ship, commanded by one Birmingham, was sent round Donnell, under pretence of being direct from Spain. She carried some casks of Spanish wine, and had a crew of fifty armed men. This ship dropped anchor off Rathmill and Castle on Loch Swilly, in which neighborhood the young O'Donnell, then barely fifteen, was staying with his foster-father, McSweeney, and several companions of his own age. The unsuspecting youths were courteously invited on board the pretended Spanish ship, where, while they were being entertained in the cabin, the hatches were fastened down, the cables slipped, the sails spread to the wind, and the vessel put to sea. The threats and promises of the astonished clansmen as they gathered to the shore were answered by the mockery of the crew, who safely delivered their prize in Dublin, to the great delight of the Lord Deputy and his counsel. Five weary years of fetters and privation the young captives were doomed to pass in the dungeons of the castle before they breathed again the air of their native north. But now every ship that reached the English or Irish ports brought tidings more and more positive of the immense armada which King Philip was preparing to launch from the Tagus against England. The piratical exploits of Hawkins and Drake against the Spanish settlements in America, the barbarous execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, and the open alliance of Elizabeth with the Dutch insurgents all acted as stimulants to the habitual slowness of the Spanish sovereign. Another event, though of minor importance, added intensity to the national quarrel. Sir William Stanley, whose account of the battle of Glenmalure we lately quoted, went over to Philip with thirteen hundred English troops whom he commanded as the governor of Davinter and was taken into the councils of the Spanish sovereign. The fleet for the invasion of England was on a scale commensurate with the design. One hundred and thirty-five vessels of war, manned by eight thousand sailors and carrying nineteen thousand soldiers, sailed from the Tagus, and after encountering a severe storm off Cape Finister, reassembled at Coruna. The flower of Spanish bravery embarked in this fleet, named somewhat presumptuously the invincible armada. The sons of Sir James Fitzmorris, educated at Alcala, Thomas, son of Sir John of Desmond, with several other Irish exiles, laymen and ecclesiastics, were also on board. The fate of the expedition is well known. A series of disasters befell it on the coasts of France and Belgium, and finally, towards the middle of August, a terrific storm swept the Spaniards northward through the British Channel, scattering ships and men helpless and lifeless on the coasts of Scotland, and even as far north as Norway. On the Irish shore, nineteen great vessels were sunk or stranded. In Lockfoyle, one galleon, manned by eleven hundred men, came ashore, and some of the survivors, it is alleged, were given up by O'Donnell to the Lord Deputy, in the vain hope of obtaining in return the liberation of his son. Sir John O'Dority in Ineshowan, Sir Brian O'Rourke at Dramahare, and Hugh O'Neill at Dunganon, hospitably entertained and protected several hundreds who had escaped with their lives. On the iron bound coast of Canot, over two thousand men perished. In Galway Harbour, seventy thousand prisoners were taken by the Queen's garrison, and executed on St. Augustine's Hill. In the Shannon, the crew of a disabled vessel set her on fire, and escaped to another in the offing. On the coasts of Cork and Kerry, nearly one thousand men were lost or cast away. In all, according to a state paper of the time, above six thousand Spaniards were either drowned, killed, or captured on the northwest and southern coasts. A more calamitous reverse could not have befallen Spain or Ireland in the era of the Reformation. It is worthy of remark that at the very moment the fear of the armada was most intensely felt in England, the beginning of July, Sir John Perot was recalled from the Government. His high and imperious temper, not less than his reliance on the native chiefs, rather than on the courtiers of Dublin Castle, had made him many enemies. He was succeeded by a Lord Deputy of a different character, Sir William Fitzwilliam, who had filled the same office for a short period seventeen years before. The administration of this nobleman was protracted till the year 1594, and is chiefly memorable in connection with the formation of the Ulster Confederacy under the leadership of O'Neill and O'Donnell. Fitzwilliam, whose master passion was avarice, had no sooner been sworn into the Government than he issued a commission to search for treasure, which the shipwrecked Spaniards were supposed to have saved. In hopes to finger some of it, he had once marched into the territory of O'Rourke and O'Dority. O'Rourke fled to Scotland, was given up by an order of James VI, and subsequently executed at London. O'Dority and Sir John O'Gallagher, two of the most loyal subjects in Ulster, were seized and confined in the castle. An outrage of a still more monstrous kind was perpetrated soon after on the newly elected chieftain of Oriole, Hugh McMahon. Though he had engaged Fitzwilliam by a bribe of six hundred cows to recognize his secession, he was seized by order of the deputy, tried by a jury of common soldiers on a trumped-up charge of treason, and executed at his own door. Sir Harry Bagnell, who as Marshal of Ireland had his headquarters at Newry, next to Fitzwilliam himself, profited most by the consequent partition and settlement of McMahon's vast estates. Emboldened by the impunity which attended such high-handed proceedings and instigated by the Marshal, Fitzwilliam began to practice against the Abelist as well as the most powerful of all the northern chiefs, who had hitherto been known only as a courtier and soldier of the Queen. This was Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, another of Sir Henry Sidney's strong men, with the additional advantage of being familiar from his youth with the character of the men he was now to encounter. O'Neill, in the full prime of life, really desired to live in peace with Elizabeth, provided he might be allowed to govern Ulster with all the authority attached to his name. Bred up in England, he well knew the immense resources of that kingdom and the indomitable character of its Queen. A patriot of Ulster, rather than of Ireland, he had served against the Desmond's and had been a looker on at Smerick. To suppress the rivals of his own clan, to check O'Donnell's encroachments, and to preserve an interest at the English court were the objects of his earlier ambition. In pursuing these objects he did not hesitate to employ English troops in Ulster, nor to accompany the Queen and her deputy to the service of the Church of England. If, however, he really believed that he could long continue to play the Celtic Prince north of the Boyne and the English Earl at Dublin or London, he was soon undeceived when the fear of the Spanish armada ceased to weigh on the councils of Elizabeth. A natural son of John the Proud, called from the circumstances of his birth Hugh of the Fetters, communicated to William the fact of Tyrone having sheltered the shipwrecked Spaniards and employed them in opening up a correspondence with King Philip. This so exasperated the Earl that, having seized the unfortunate Hugh of the Fetters, he caused him to be hanged as a common felon, a high-handed proceeding which his enemies were expert in turning to account. To protect himself from the consequent danger he went to England in May 1590 without requiring the licence of the Lord Deputy, as by law required. On arriving in London he was imprisoned, but in the course of a month obtained his liberty after signing articles in which he agreed to drop the Celtic title of O'Neill, to allow the erection of jails in his country, that he should execute no man without a commission from the Lord Deputy except in cases of martial law, that he should keep his troop of horsemen in the Queen's pay ready for the Queen's service, and that Tyrone should be regularly reduced to shire-ground. For the performance of these articles, which he confirmed on reaching Dublin, he was to place sureties in the hands of certain merchants of that city, or gentlemen of the pale, enjoying the confidence of the Crown. On such hard conditions his earldom was confirmed to him, and he was apparently taken into all his former favour. But we may date the conception of his latter and more national policy from the period of this journey, and the brief imprisonment he had undergone in London. The profound assembling mind which English historians, his co-temporaries, attribute to O'Neill, was now brought into daily exercise. When he discovered money to be the master-passion of the Lord Deputy, he procured his convivance at the escape of Hugh Rowe O'Donnell from Dublin Castle. On a dark night in the depth of winter the youthful chief, with several of his companions, succeeded in escaping to the hills in the neighbourhood of Powerscourt, but exhausted and bewildered they were again taken and returned to their dungeons. Two years later the air of Tirkanal was more fortunate. In Christmas week, 1592, he again escaped, through a sewer of the castle, with Henry and Art O'Neill, sons of John the Proud. In the street they found O'Hagan, the confidential agent of Tyrone, waiting to guide them to the fastness of Glenmalure. Through the deep snows of the Dublin and Wicklow Highlands, the prisoners and their guide plotted their way. After a weary tramp they at length sunk down, overwhelmed with fatigue. In this condition they were found insensible by a party dispatched by Fig O'Burn. Art O'Neill, on being raised up, fell backward and expired. O'Donnell was so severely frostbitten that he did not recover for many months the free use of his limbs. With his remaining companions he was nursed in the recesses of Glenmalure, until he became able to sit a horse, when he set out for home. Although the utmost vigilance was exercised by all the waters of the pale, he crossed the Liffey and the Boyne undiscovered, rode boldly through the streets of Dundalk, and found an enthusiastic welcome, first from Tyrone in Dunganon, and soon after from the aged chief, his father, in the castle of Ballyshannon. Early in the following year the elder O'Donnell resigned the chieftaincy in favour of his popular son, who was, on the third of May, duly proclaimed the O'Donnell, from the ancient mound of Kilmedcrennan. The Ulster Confederacy, of which for ten years O'Neill and O'Donnell were the joint and inseparable leaders, was now eminent. Tyrone, by carrying off the year previous to O'Donnell's escape, the beautiful sister of Marshal Bagnal, whom he married, had still further inflamed the hatred borne to him by that officer. Bagnal complained bitterly of the abduction to the queen, charging, among other things, that O'Neill had a divorced wife still alive. A challenge was in consequence sent him by his new brother-in-law, but the cartel was not accepted. Every day's events were hastening a general alliance between the legendary chieftains of the province and the two leading spirits. The O'Rourke and Maguire were attacked by Bingham, and successfully defended themselves until the Lord Deputy and the Marshal also marched against them, summoning O'Neill to their aid. The latter, feeling that the time was not yet ripe, temperized with Fitzwilliam during the campaign of 1593, and though in the field at the head of his horsemen, nominally for the queen, he seems to have rather employed his opportunities to promote that northern union which he had so much at heart. End of Chapter 7. Read by Isabella Denton.