as has been seen, of a vast tract of Ireland, covering the greater part
of Munster. Earlier and perhaps more completely than any of the other
great Norman houses, they had become Irish chieftains rather than
English subjects, and the opening of Elizabeth's reign found them still
what for centuries past they had been, and with their power, within
their own limits, little if at all curtailed. The Desmond of the day had
still his own judges or Brehons, by whose judgment he professed to rule.
He had still his own palatinate courts; he still collected his dues by
force, driving away his clansmen's cattle, and distraining those who
resisted him. Only a few years before this time, during an expedition of
the kind, he and Ormond had encountered one another in the open field at
Affane, upon the Southern Blackwater, each side flying their banners,
and shouting their war cries as if no queen's representative had ever
been seen or heard of.
Such a state of things, it was plain, could not go on indefinitely,
would not indeed have gone on as long but for the confusion and disorder
in which the country had always been plunged, and especially the want of
all settled communication. The palatinate of Ormond, it is true, was
theoretically in much the same state, but then Ormond was a keener
sighted and a wiser man than Desmond, and knew when the times demanded
redress. He had of late even made some effort to abolish the abominable
system of "coyne and livery," although, as he himself frankly admits, he
was forced to impose it again in another form not long afterwards.
Sir James meanwhile had left Ireland, and at every Catholic Court in
Europe was busily pleading for aid towards a crusade against England.
Failing in France, he appealed to Philip of Spain. Philip, however, at
the moment was not prepared to break with Elizabeth, whereupon
Fitzmaurice, undeterred by failure, presented himself next before the
Pope. Here he was more successful, and preparations for the collection
of a considerable force was at once set on foot, a prominent English
refugee, Dr. Nicolas Saunders, being appointed to accompany it
as legate.
Saunders, who had distinguished himself not long before by a violent
personal attack against Elizabeth, threw himself heart and soul into the
enterprise, and in a letter to Philip pointed out all the advantages
that were to be won by it to the Catholic cause. "Men," he assured him,
"were not needed." Guns, powder, a little money, and a ship or two with
stores from Spain, and the whole country would soon be at his feet.
Although absurdly ignorant, as his own letters prove, of a country of
which he had once been nominally king, Philip knew rather more probably
about the circumstance of the case than Saunders, and he met these
insinuating suggestions coldly. A fleet in the end was fitted out and
sent from Civita Vecchia, under the command of an English adventurer
Stukeley, the same Stukeley in whose favour we saw Shane O'Neill
appealing to Elizabeth. Though it started for Ireland it never arrived
there. Touching at Lisbon, Stukeley was easily persuaded to give up his
first scheme, and to join Sebastian, king of Portugal, in a buccaneering
expedition to Morocco, and at the battle of Alcansar both he and
Sebastian with the greater part of their men were killed.
Fitzmaurice meanwhile had gone to Spain by land, and had there embarked
for Ireland, accompanied by his wife, two children, Saunders, the
legate, Allen, an Irish priest, a small party of Italians and Spaniards,
and a few English refugees, and bringing with them a banner especially
consecrated by the Pope for this service.
Their landing-place was Dingle, and from there they crossed to Smerwick,
where they fortified the small island peninsula of Oilen-an-Oir, or
"Gold Island," where they were joined by John and James Fitzgerald,
brothers of the Earl of Desmond, and by a party of two hundred
O'Flaherties from Iar Connaught, who, however, speedily left again.
But Desmond still vacillated helplessly. Now that the time had come he
could not make up his mind what to do, or with whom to side. He was
evidently cowed. His three imprisonments lay heavily upon his soul. He
knew the power of England better too than most of his adherents, and
shrank from measuring his own strength against it. What he did not
realize was that it was too late now to go back. He had stood out for
what he considered his own rights when it would have been more politic
to have submitted, and now he wanted to submit when it was only too
plain to all who could read the signs of the times that the storm was
already upon him, and that no humility or late-found loyalty could avail
to avert that doom which hung over his house.
If Desmond himself was slow to rise, the whole South of Ireland was in a
state of wild tumult and excitement when the news of the actual arrival
of Fitzmaurice and the legate became known. Nor in the south alone. In
Connaught and the Pale the excitement was very little less. Kildare,
like Desmond, held back fearing the personal consequences of rebellion,
but all the younger lords of the Pale were eager to throw in their lot
with Fitzmaurice. Alone amongst the Irishmen of his day, he possessed
all the necessary qualifications of a leader. He had already for years
successfully resisted the English. He was known to be a man of great
courage and tenacity, and his reputation as a general stood deservedly
high in the opinion of all his countrymen.
[Illustration: CATHERINE, THE "OLD" COUNTESS OF DESMOND. (Reputed to
have been killed at the age of 120 by a fall from a cherry tree.) _(From
the Burne Collection.)_]
That extraordinary good fortune, however, which has so often befallen
England at awkward moments, and never more conspicuously than during the
closing years of the sixteenth century, did not fail now. Fitzmaurice
started for Connaught to encourage the insurrection which had been fast
ripening there under the brutal rule of Sir Nicolas Malby, its governor.
A trumpery quarrel had recently broken out between the Desmonds and the
Mayo Bourkes, and this insignificant affair sealed the fate of what at
one moment promised to be the most formidable rebellion which had ever
assailed the English power in Ireland. At a place called Harrington's
Bridge, not far from Limerick, where the little river Muckern or
Mulkearn was then crossed by a ford, Fitzmaurice was set upon by the
Bourkes. Only a few followers were with him at the time, and in turning
to expostulate with one of his assailants, he was killed by a pistol
shot, and fell from his horse. This was upon the 18th of August, 1579.
From that moment the Desmond rising was doomed.
Desmond meanwhile still sat vacillating in his own castle of Askeaton,
neither joining the rising, nor yet exerting himself vigorously to put
it down. Malby, who had newly arrived from Connaught, took steps to
hasten his decision. Ordering the earl to come to him, and the latter
still hesitating, he marched against Askeaton, utterly destroyed the
town up to the walls of the castle, burning everything in the
neighbourhood, including the abbey and the tombs of the Desmonds, the
castle itself only escaping through the lack of ammunition.
This hint seems to have sufficed. Desmond was at last convinced that the
time for temporizing was over. He rose, and all Munster rose with him.
Ormond was still in London, and hurried over to find all in disorder.
Drury had lately died, and the only other English commander, Malby, was
crippled for want of men, and had been obliged to retreat into
Connaught. The new deputy, Sir William Pelham, had just arrived, and he
and Ormond now proceeded to make a concerted attack. Advancing in two
separate columns they destroyed everything which came in their way; men,
women, children, infants, the old, the blind, the sick all alike were
mercilessly slaughtered; not a roof, however humble, was spared; not a
living creature that crossed their path survived to tell the tale. Lady
Fitzmaurice and her two little children seem to have been amongst the
number of these nameless and uncounted victims, for they were never
heard of again. From Adare and Askeaton to the extreme limits of Kerry,
everything perishable was destroyed. The two commanders met one another
at Tralee, and from this point carried on their raid in unison, and
returned, to Askeaton and Cork, leaving the whole country a desert
behind them. There was little or no resistance. The Desmond clansmen
were not soldiers; they were unarmed, or armed only with spears and
skeans. They had just lost their only leader. They could do nothing but
sullenly watch the progress of the English forces. Desmond, his two
brothers, and the legate were already fugitives. The rising seemed to be
all but crushed, when a new incident occurred to spur it into a
momentary vitality.
Four Spanish vessels, containing 800 men, chiefly Italians, had managed
to pass unperceived by the English admiral, Winter's, fleet, and to land
at Smerwick, where they established themselves in Fitzmaurice's
dismantled fort. They found everything in confusion. They had brought
large supplies of arms for their Irish allies, but there were apparently
no Irish allies to give them to. The legate and Desmond had first to be
found, and now that arms had come, the Munster tribesmen had for the
most part been killed or dispersed. Ormond and Pelham's terrible raid
had done its work, and the heart of the rising was broken. The Pale,
however, had now caught the fire, and though Kildare, its natural
leader, still hung back, Lord Baltinglass and some of the bolder spirits
flew to arms, and threw themselves into the Wicklow highlands where they
joined their forces with those of the O'Byrnes, and were presently
joined by Sir John of Desmond and a handful of Fitzgeralds.
Lord Grey de Wilton had by this time arrived in Ireland as deputy.
Utterly inexperienced in Irish wars, he despised and underrated the
capabilities of those opposed to him, and refused peremptorily to listen
to the advice of more experienced men. Hastening south, his advanced
guard was caught by Baltinglass and the other insurgents in the valley
of Glenmalure. A well-directed fire was poured into the defile; the
English troops broke, and tried to flee, and were shot down in numbers
amongst the rocks.
Lord Grey had no time to retrieve this disaster. Leaving the Pale to the
mercy of the successful rebels, he hastened south, and arrived in Kerry
before Smerwick fort. Amongst the small band of officers who accompanied
him on this occasion were Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser, both then
young men, and both of them all but unknown to fame.
The English admiral, Winter, with his fleet had long been delayed by bad
weather. When at length it arrived, cannon were landed and laid in
position upon the sand hills. Next day the siege commenced. There was
heavy firing on both sides, but the fort was soon found to be untenable.
The garrison thereupon offered to capitulate, and an unconditional
surrender was demanded. There being no alternative, these terms were
accepted. Lord Grey thereupon "put in certain bands," under the command
of Captain Raleigh. "The Spaniard," says Spenser, who was an eye-witness
of the whole scene, "did absolutely yield himself, and the fort, and all
therein, and only asked mercy," This, "it was not thought good," he
adds, "to show them." They were accordingly all slaughtered in cold
blood, a few women and priests who were with them hanged, the officers
being reserved for ransom. "There was no other way," Spenser observes in
conclusion, "but to make that end of them as thus was done[8]."
[8] "View of the State of Ireland," pp. 5, 11.
This piece of work satisfactorily finished, Grey returned rapidly to
Dublin to crush the Leinster insurgents. Kildare and Delvin, though they
had kept themselves clear of the rebellion, were arrested and thrown
into prison. Small bands of troopers were sent into the Wicklow
mountains to hunt out the insurgents. Baltinglass escaped to the
Continent, but the two Eustaces his brothers, with Garrot O'Toole and
Feagh McHugh were caught, killed, and their heads sent to Dublin.
Clanricarde's two sons, the Mac-an-Earlas, were out in the Connemara
mountains and could not be got at; but Malby again overran their
country, burning houses and slaughtering without mercy. In Dublin, the
Anglo-Irishmen of the Pale were being brought to trial for treason, and
hung or beheaded in batches. Kildare was sent to England to die in the
Tower. With the exception of the North, which on this occasion had kept
quiet, the whole country had become one great reeking shambles; what
sword and rope and torch had spared, famine came in to complete.
The Earl of Desmond was now a houseless fugitive, hunted like a wolf or
mad dog through the valleys and over the mountains of his own ancestral
"kingdom." His brothers had already fallen. Sir John Fitzgerald had been
killed near Cork, and his body hung head downwards, by Raleigh's order,
upon the bridge of the river Lee. The other brother, Sir James, had met
with a similar fate. Saunders, the legate, had died of cold and
exposure. Desmond alone escaped, time after time, and month after month.
Hunted, desperate, in want of the bare necessities of life, he was still
in his own eyes the Desmond, ancestral owner of nearly a hundred miles
of territory. Never in his most successful period a man of any
particular strength of character, sheer pride seems to have upheld him
now. He scorned to make terms with his hated enemy, Ormond. If he
yielded to any one, he sent word, it would be only to the queen herself
in person. He was not given the chance. Hunted over the Slemish
mountains, with the price of £1,000 on his head, one by one the trusty
companions who had clung to him so faithfully were taken and killed. His
own course could inevitably be but a short one. News reached the English
captain at Castlemain one night that the prey was not far off. A dozen
English soldiers stole up the stream in the grey of the morning. The
cabin where the Desmond lay was surrounded, the door broken in, and the
earl stabbed before there was time for him to spring from his bed. The
tragedy had now been played out to the bitterest end. As formerly with
the Leinster Geraldines, so now with the Munster ones, of the direct
heirs of the house only a single child was left, a feeble boy,
afterwards known by the significant title of the "Tower Earl," with the
extinguishing of whose sickly tenure of life the very name of Desmond
ceases to appear upon the page of Irish history.
XXVII.
BETWEEN TWO MORE STORMS.
Two great risings against Elizabeth's power in Ireland had thus been met
and suppressed. A third and a still more formidable one was yet to come.
The interval was filled with renewed efforts at colonization upon a yet
larger scale than before. Munster, which at the beginning of the Desmond
rising had been accounted the most fertile province in Ireland, was now
little better than a desert. Not once or twice, but many times the
harvest had been burnt and destroyed, and great as had been the
slaughter, numerous as were the executions, they had been far eclipsed
by the multitude of those who had died of sheer famine.
Spenser's evidence upon this point has been often quoted, but no other
words will bring the picture before us in the same simple, awful
vividness; nor must it be forgotten that the man who tells it was under
no temptation to exaggerate having himself been a sharer in the deeds
which had produced so sickening a calamity.
"They were brought to such wretchedness," he says, "that any stony heart
would rue the same. Out of every corner of the woods and glens, they
came, creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear
them. They looked like anatomies of death; they spoke like ghosts crying
out of their graves. They did eat the dead carrions, where they did find
them, yea and one another soon after, in as much as the very carcases
they spared not to scrape out of their graves; and if they found a plot
of watercresses or shamrocks, there they thronged as to a feast."
To replace this older population, thus starved, slaughtered, made away
with by sword and pestilence with new colonists was the scheme of the
hour. Desmond's vast estate, covering nearly six hundred thousand Irish
acres, not counting waste land, had all been declared forfeit to the
Crown. This and a considerable portion of territory also forfeit in
Leinster was now offered to English colonists upon the most advantageous
terms. No rent was to be paid at first, and for ten years the
undertakers were to be allowed to send their exports duty free.
Many eminent names figure in the long list of these "undertakers";
amongst them Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Christopher Hatton, Sir Wareham St.
Leger, Edmund Spenser himself, Sir Thomas Norris, and others, all of
whom received grants of different portions. But "the greater," says
Leland, "their rank and consequence, the more were they emboldened to
neglect the terms of their grant." Instead of completing their
stipulated number of tenantry, the same persons often were admitted as
tenants to different undertakers, and in the same seniory sometimes
served at once as freeholder, leaseholder, and copyholder, so as to fill
up the necessary number of each denomination.
The whole scheme of colonization proved, in short, a miserable failure.
English farmers and labourers declined to come over in sufficient
numbers. Those that did come left again in despair after a time. The
dispossessed owners hung about, and raided the goods of the settlers
whenever opportunity offered. The exasperation on both sides increased
as years went on; the intruders becoming fewer and more tyrannical, the
natives rapidly growing more numerous and more desperate. It was plain
that the struggle would break out again at the first chance which
offered itself.
That occasion arose not in Munster itself, but at the opposite end of
the island. In Ulster the great southern rising had produced singularly
little excitement. The chiefs for the most part had remained aloof, and
to a great degree, loyal. The O'Donnells, who had been reinstated it
will be remembered in their own territory by Sidney, kept the peace. Sir
John Perrot, who after the departure of Grey became Lord-deputy, seems
in spite of his severity to have won confidence. Old Tyrlough Luinagh
who had been elected O'Neill at the death of Shane, seems even to have
felt a personal attachment for him, which is humorously shown by his
consenting on several occasions to appear at his court in English
attire, habiliments which the Irish, like the the Scotch chiefs,
objected to strongly as tending to make them ridiculous. "Prythee at
least, my lord," he is reported to have said on one of these occasions,
"let my chaplain attend me in his Irish mantle, that so your English
rabble may be directed from my uncouth figure and laugh at him."
[Illustration: _Sr. John Perrot_ LORD-DEPUTY FROM 1584 TO 1588.]
Perrot, however, had now fallen under the royal displeasure; had been
recalled and sent to the Tower, a common enough climax in those days to
years spent in the arduous Irish service. His place was taken in 1588 by
Sir William Fitzwilliam, who had held it nearly thirty years earlier.
Fitzwilliam was a man of very inferior calibre to Perrot. Avaricious by
nature he had been highly dissatisfied with the poor rewards which his
former services had obtained. Upon making some remonstrance to that
effect he had been told that the "position of an Irish Lord-deputy was
an honourable one and should challenge no reward." Upon this hint he
seems now to have acted. Since the Lord-deputy was not to be better
rewarded, the Lord-deputy, he apparently concluded, had better help
himself. The Spanish Armada had been destroyed a few years back, and
ships belonging to it had been strewed in dismal wreck all along the
North, South, and West coasts of Ireland. It was believed that much gold
had been hidden away by the wretched survivors, and fired with the hope
of laying his own hands upon this treasure, Sir William first issued a
permission for searching, and then started himself upon the search. He
marched into Ulster in the dead of winter, at considerable cost to the
State, and with absolutely no result. Either, as was most likely, there
was no treasure, or the treasure had been well hidden. Furious at this
disappointment he arrested two upon his own showing of the most loyal
and law-abiding landowners in Ulster, Sir Owen McToole and Sir John
O'Dogherty; dragged them back to Dublin with him, flung them into the
castle, and demanded a large sum for their liberation.
This was a high-handed proceeding in all conscience, but there was worse
to come; it seemed as if the new deputy had laid himself out for the
task of inflaming Ulster to the highest possible pitch of exasperation,
and so of once more awakening the scarce extinguished flames of civil
war. McMahon, the chief of Monaghan, had surrendered his lands, held
previously by tanistry, and had received a new grant of them under the
broad seal of England, to himself and his heirs male, and failing such
heirs to his brother Hugh. At his death Hugh went to Dublin and
requested to be put into possession of his inheritance. This Fitzwilliam
agreed to, and returned with him to Monaghan, apparently for the
purpose. Hardly had he arrived there, however, before he trumped up an
accusation to the effect that Hugh McMahon had collected rents two years
previously by force--the only method, it may be said in passing, by
which in those unsettled parts of the country rents ever were collected
at all. It was not an offence by law being committed outside the shire,
and he was therefore tried for it by court-martial. He was brought
before a jury of private soldiers, condemned, and executed in two days.
His estate was thereupon broken up, the greater part of it being divided
between Sir Henry Bagnall, three or four English officers, and some
Dublin lawyers, the Crown reserving for itself a quit rent. Little
wonder if the other Ulster landowners felt that their turn would come
next, and that no loyalty could assure a man's safety so long as he had
anything to lose that was worth the taking.
At this time the natural leader of the province was not Tyrlough
Luinagh, who though called the O'Neill was an old man and failing fast.
The real leader was Hugh O'Neill, son of Matthew the first Baron of
Dungannon, who had been killed, it will be remembered, by Shane O'Neill,
by whose connivance Hugh's elder brother had also, it was believed, been
made away with. Hugh had been educated in England, had been much at
Court, and had found favour with Elizabeth, who had confirmed him in the
title of Earl of Tyrone which had been originally granted to his
grandfather.
Tyrone was the very antipodes of Shane, the last great O'Neill leader.
He was much more, in fact, of an English politician and courtier than an
Irish chieftain. He had served in the English army; had fought with
credit under Grey in Munster, and was intimately acquainted with all the
leading Englishmen of the day. Even his religion, unlike that of most
Irish Catholics of the day, seems to have sat but lightly upon him.
Captain Lee, an English officer, quartered in Ulster, in a very
interesting letter to the queen written about this time, assures her
confidentially that, although a Roman Catholic, he "is less dangerously
or hurtfully so than some of the greatest in the English Pale," for that
when he accompanied the Lord-deputy to church "he will stay and hear a
sermon;" whereas they "when they have reached the church door depart as
if they were wild cats." He adds, as a further recommendation, that by
way of domestic chaplain he has at present but "one little cub of an
English priest." Lord Essex in still plainer terms told Tyrone himself
when he was posing as the champion of Catholicism: "Dost _thou_ talk of
a free exercise of religion! Why thou carest as little for religion as
my horse."
Such a man was little likely to rush blindly into a rebellion in which
he had much to lose and little to gain. He knew, as few Irishmen knew,
the strength of England. He knew something also of Spain, and of what
had come of trusting for help in that direction. Hitherto, therefore,
his influence had been steadily thrown upon the side of order. He had
more than once assisted the deputy to put down risings in the north,
and, on the whole, had borne his part loyally as a dutiful subject of
the queen.