the Irish tribes would forget their feuds, and unite against the common foe. And now it is heart-breaking to read how poor Fitzmaurice and his Spaniards were received. Desmond's two brothers indeed joined him at once; but the earl himself, with some views of crafty policy which one finds difficulty in understanding, long held aloof, and even at first pretended to obey the summons of Drury the English president, and raised his troops to resist the invaders. Time was wasted, and the Spaniards were sickened by their cold reception. In vain the gallant Fitzmaurice traversed Limerick, sent messengers to Connaught and the Scots, and made a pilgrimage to Holy-Cross in Tipperary, not to perform his vows alone, but to meet the emissaries of the Leinster chieftains. Before a blow was struck against the English, Fitzmaurice fell in a quarrel with one of the Burkes of Castleconnell, and John of Desmond took the command in his place. Some obscurity rests upon the events of that desultory war which followed the first Spanish landing-English historians asserting that John of Desmond was signally defeated by Malby at Monaster-neva, and that Dr. Allen was amongst the slain*-O'Sullivan and O'Daly† that the Geraldines were victorious, not only there, bu shortly after at Atharlam and Gort-na-pissi. On the whole, there appears to have been nothing very decisive done upon either side until the fol Camden. Queen Eliz. O'Daly is cited by the Abbè Mac Geoghegar. lowing year, when the Earl of Desmond seeing his lands laid waste, and himself proclaimed a traitor by the English, at last raised his standard and openly joined in the war. The earl wrote to Pelham, the Lord Deputy, announcing that he was in arms for the Catholic religion; sent messengers to Fiach Mac Hugh, chief of the O'Byrnes of Wicklow, and Eustace, Lord Baltinglass, that they might lay waste the neighbourhood of Dublin, and keep the forces of the Pale employed; while Desmond himself marched suddenly against Youghal, which he took by escalade, plundered, and garrisoned. In the meantime the Earl of Ormond and the English generals, Malby and Pelham, were wasting and plundering the county of Limerick: and indeed on their part the war was entirely carried on by destroying the cattle and growing crops of the country, and reducing Desmond's castles of Carrig-a-foyle, Askeaton, Ballyloghan, and Castlemaine. There was no pitched-battle, so that in all that warre there perished not many by the sword, but all by the extremity of famine." The cruellest warfare ever waged by man; until the whole territories of Desmond lay a smoking desert where neither man nor beast could live. The Catholic clergy who had been the principal cause of the war were pursued with unusual fury; and eight hundred Spaniards who landed at Smerwick in September 1680 were instantly besieged there by Ormond, and shortly. after invested closely both by sea and land, until * Spenser's View they surrendered at discretion ;* and were all in cold blood massacred by order of Lord Grey. The most powerful opponent of Desmond was his hereditary enemy the Earl of Ormond, who was assisted also by the Lord Roche and other Anglo-Irish lords, and, rather unaccountably, by Hugh O'Neill of Dungannon, who commanded a body of cavalry for the queen. One would prefer to find this Hugh on the other side; but it seems that the nationality of an O'Neill did not yet extend beyond Ulster, at which we can wonder the less when we read that in the southern war the greater portion of the Irish race was on the side of Elizabeth and at feud with the Geraldines. Hugh was content to keep the English at a distance from his own territories, and had not probably at that period conceived the grand design of uniting all Ireland against the stranger. Of his achievements in the South we have no particular record, save that he behaved himself right valiantly, as we can well suppose; and further that he gained the good-will of his ally the Earl of Ormond, for it was one of the gifts of Hugh O'Neill that he irresistibly attracted to himself the hearts of all men, and all women also, whose love he desired to win. One Two other very notable men appear in the ranks of the English, in that Munster war. is Walter Raleigh, afterwards Sir Walter; then one of the most active of Irish undertakers; destined to be a planter in Virginia, to be an under. The Irish historians say they capitulated on sworn articles; but Spenser elaborately controverts this. 66 taker in El Dorado; to wander wide over earth and sea, fighting the Spaniard, chasing plate fleets, navigating the Orinoco:-and alas! destined also to dree his weary thirteen years in the dungeons of London, and write a History of the World" there, and at last to lay his gray head upon the block, and so end the career of the wildest and most brilliant adventurer of that adventurous age And the other is Edmund Spenser, a man well known to Gloriana and all the realm of Faerie. He came over in the train of Lord Grey of Wilton,* saw the horrible ending of the Geraldine war, and had his share of the spoils. Kilcolman castle and its fair domains fell to the poet undertaker; and there, "under the foot of Mole, that mountainhoar," dwelling contentedly in another man's house-sitting in quietness under another man's vine and fig-tree, within view of the smoking ruins of tower and town and the unburied skeletons of a famished nation, he began inditing that solemn and tender strain, the intent of which he has informed us is "to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline," nay, he drew inspiration from the hideous Golgotha that lay around him; and when his Merlin tells of the ravage to be made by king Gormonde,† he has only to describe what the poet saw with his mere bodily eye in the vales of Munster: "He in his furie all shall over-ronne, And holy church with faithless hands deface. 1580. "Faerie Queene," B. 3, c. 3. E That thy sad people, utterly fordonne, And the greene grasse that groweth they shall bren, That even the wilde beast shall dy in starved den "* From Kilcolman also the poet took that most astonishing "View of the State of Ireland," of which we shall see more hereafter;-a most practical view, the view not of a bard but of an undertaker, whereby we find, that however his imagination may have bled for enchanted damosels or elfin knights, suffering sentimental woes, the heart of him, in dealing with mere living wights, was harder than the nether millstone. At last all the Munster and Leinster Irish were broken and reduced, except the redoubtable Fiach Mac Hugh of Wicklow; and during all this long and inglorious war the only day of which one can speak with pleasure, is the day of Glendalough. Immediately on Lord Grey's ar rival in Dublin-it was the summer of 1580-he led a large force of horse and foot into the mountains, fully resolved to grapple with the fierce O'Byrne in his own strongholds, and crush that gallant sept for ever. When the army arrived at the entrance of the valley, the cavalry under command of Grey himself scoured the open "The very wolves, the foxes, and other like ravening beasts, many of them lay dead, being famished."-Holinthed. See also Spenser's own horrible picture of this famine. |