1567

June

buried in the restoration of Surleyboy; an alliance was CHAP XI again talked of, and for two days all went well. But the death of their leaders in the field was not the only wrong which Shan had offered to the Western Islanders: he had divorced James M'Connell's daughter; he had kept a high-born Scottish lady with him as his mistress; and last of all, after killing M'Connell he had asked Argyle to give him M'Connell's widow for a wife. The lady herself, to escape the dishonour, had remained in concealment in Edinburgh; but the mention of it had been taken as a mortal insult by her family.

The third evening, Monday the 2nd of June, after supper, when the wine and the whiskey had gone freely round, and the blood in Shan's veins had warmed again, Gillespie M'Connell, who had watched him from the first with an ill-boding eye, turned round upon M'Kevin and asked scornfully 'whether it was he who had bruited abroad that the lady his aunt did offer to come from Scotland to Ireland to marry with his master?'

M'Kevin, meeting scorn with scorn, said that if his aunt was Queen of Scotland she might be proud to match the O'Neil.'

It is false!' the fierce Scot shouted; my aunt is too honest a woman to match with her husband's murderer.' Shan, who was perhaps drunk, heard the words; and forgetting where he was, flung back the lie in Gillespie's throat. Gillespie sprung to his feet, ran out of the tent, and raised the slogan of the Isles. A hundred dirks flashed into the moonlight, and the Irish wherever they could be found were struck down and stabbed. Some two or three found their horses and escaped; all the rest were murdered; and Shan himself, gashed with fifty wounds, was wrapped in a kern's old shirt' and flung into a pit dug hastily among the ruined arches of Glenarm.

CHAP XI

1567 June

Even there what was left of him was not allowed to rest; four days later Piers, the captain of Knockfergus, hacked the head from the body, and carried it on a spear's point through Drogheda to Dublin, where staked upon a spike it bleached on the battlements of the castle, a symbol to the Irish world of the fate of Celtic heroes.1

So died Shan O'Neil, one of those champions of Irish nationality, who under varying features have repeated themselves in the history of that country with periodic regularity. At once a drunken ruffian and a keen and fiery patriot, the representative in his birth of the line of the ancient kings, the ideal in his character of all which Irishmen most admired, regardless in his actions of the laws of God and man, yet the devoted subject in his creed of the Holy Catholic Church; with an eye which could see far beyond the limits of his own island, and a tongue which could touch the most passionate chords of the Irish heart; the like of him has been seen many times in that island, and the like of him may be seen many times again, till the Ethiopian has changed his skin and the leopard his spots.'

Numbers of his letters remain, to the Queen, to Sussex, to Sidney, to Cecil, and to foreign princes; farreaching, full of pleasant flattery and promises which cost him nothing; but showing true ability and insight. Sinner though he was, he too in his turn was sinned against; in the stained page of Irish misrule there is no second instance in which an English ruler stooped to treachery or to the infamy of attempted assassination; and it is not to be forgotten that Lord Sussex, who has left under his own hand the evidence of his own baseness, continued a trusted and favoured councillor of Elizabeth,

Sir William Fitzwilliam to Cecil, June 10.-Irish MSS. Rolls House.

while Sidney, who fought Shan and conquered him in CHAP XI the open field, found only suspicion and hard words.

How just Sidney's calculations had been, how ably his plans were conceived, how bravely they were carried out, was proved by their entire success, notwithstanding the unforeseen and unlikely calamity at Londonderry. In one season Ireland was reduced for the first time to universal peace and submission. While the world was full of Sidney's praises Elizabeth persevered in writing letters to him which Cecil in his own name and the name of the Council was obliged to disclaim. But at last the Queen too became gradually gracious; she condescended to acknowledge that he had recovered Ireland for her Crown, and thanked him for his services.

1567 June

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IT

CHAPTER XII.

CHAP XII TT is the purpose of this chapter to trace the first movements of the struggle which transferred from Spain to England the sovereignty of the seas; the first beginnings of that proud power which, rising out of the heart of the people, has planted the saplings of the English race in every quarter of the globe, has covered the ocean with its merchant fleets; and flaunts its flag in easy supremacy among the nations of the earth.

In the English nature there were and are two antagonistic tendencies-visible alike in our laws, in our institutions, in our religion, in our families, in the thoughts and actions of our greatest men: a disposition on the one hand to live by rule and precedent, to distrust novelties, to hold the experience of the past as a surer guide than the keenest conclusions of logic, and to maintain with loving reverence the customs, the convictions, and traditions which have come down to us from other generations; on the other hand, a restless impetuous energy, inventing, expanding, pressing forward into the future, regarding what has been already achieved only as a step or landing-place leading upwards and onwards to higher conquests-a mode of thought which in the halfeducated takes the form of a rash disdain of earlier ages, which in the best and wisest creates a sense that we

shall be unworthy of our ancestors if we do not eclipse CHAP XII them in all that they touched, if we do not draw larger circles round the compass of their knowledge, and extend our power over nature, over the world, and over ourselves.

In healthy ages as in healthy persons the two tendencies coexist, and produce that even progress, that strong vitality at once so vigorous and so composed, which is legible everywhere in the pages of English history. Under the accidental pressure of special causes one or other disposition has for a time become predominant, and intervals of torpor and inactivity have been followed by a burst of license, when in one direction or another law and order have become powerless-when the people, shaking themselves free from custom, have hurried forward in the energy of their individual impulses, and new thoughts and new inclinations, like a rush of pent-up waters, have swept all before them.

character of

before the

century.

Through the century and a half which intervened Stationary between the death of Edward the Third and the fall of English Wolsey, the English sea-going population with but few marine exceptions had moved in a groove, in which they lived sixteenth and worked from day to day and year to year with unerring uniformity. The wine brigs made their annual voyages to Bordeaux and Cadiz; the hoys plied with such regularity as the winds allowed them between the Scheldt and the Thames; summer after summer the 'Iceland fleet' went north for the cod and ling, which were the food of the winter fasting days; the boats of Yarmouth and Rye, Southampton, Poole, Brixham, Dartmouth, Plymouth, and Fowie fished the Channel. The people themselves, though hardy and industrious, and though as much at home upon the ocean as their Scandinavian forefathers or their descendants in modern