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to the doomed fort, received out of the ships eight culverins, with a supply of powder and shot. On Monday, the seventh of November, the Lord Deputy pitched his tent within cannon shot of the fort, and with help of the men from the ships carried on the digging of the trench so far that, on the same night, two culverins were placed within three hundred yards of the enemy. The besiegers opened fire on Tuesday morning, and before two o'clock in the afternoon they had dismounted all the pieces in the fort. On Wednesday, the ninth, the attack was pressed so closely that at four in the afternoon the leaders of the besieged came bareheaded with a white flag to the rampart, and asked for parley to arrange terms of surrender. They were obliged to surrender absolutely, yielding themselves to the Lord Deputy's will for life or death. Hostages were asked for and given, all further action being left till the next day, and during the night the trench was carried to within sixty paces of the fort, and two more culverins were planted. What happened on Thursday, the tenth of November, is best told in the Lord Deputy's own words, from his despatch to the queen written "from the camp at Smerwick" two days later. Morning came: I presented my forces in battle before the fort. The coronel came with ten or eleven of his chief gentlemen, trailing their ensigns, rolled up, and presented them to me with their lives and the fort. I sent straight certain gentlemen in to see their weapons and armours laid down, and to guard the munition and victual, then left, from spoil then I put in certain bands who straight fell to execution. There were six hundred slain, ammunition and victual great store, though much wasted through the disorders of the soldiers which in the fusion could not be helped."

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Spenser assented to the action of his chief, and afterwards defended it as of that form of merciful severity which brings the miseries of warfare to a speedy end. If Spenser stood by on the evening before this massacre and heard the

Lord Deputy's answer to the plea for mercy, he would have assented with his whole mind to that also; for he, too--as we shall find in his "Faerie Queene"-treated Catholicism as "the diabolical faith," and at a time when the allegiance due from subjects to their sovereign had a large place in the political faith of Europe, he was no more likely than the good Puritan, Arthur Lord Grey of Wilton, to conceive that Roman Catholic subjects of the Pope could reasonably plead that they had done their duty in obeying the Pope's orders. "I said," wrote the Lord Deputy to Queen Elizabeth, "I said I found two nations, and willed a Spanish captain to be by, who came. I said I marvelled, their nation at peace with your Majesty, they should come. The Spaniard said the king had not sent them, but one John Martines di Ricaldi, Governor for the King at Bilboa. The other avouched that they were all sent by the Pope for the defence of the Catholica Fide. I answered, I marvelled. that men of that accompt as some of them made show of should be carried into unjust, wicked, and desperate actions by one that neither from God or man could claim any princely power or empire; but indeed a detestable shaveling, the right Antichrist, and general ambitious tyrant over all right principalities, and patron of the Diabolica Fide, I could not rest but greatly wonder. Their fault, therefore, I saw to be greatly aggravated by the malice of their commander, and at my hands no condition, no composition were they to expect, other than they should simply render me the fort, and yield themselves to my will for life or death."

One of the captains of the day whose duty it was to "proceed to execution" of the garrison in the surrendered fort was Walter Raleigh, and it was Walter probably in this expedition against the Fort Raleigh. del Ore that Spenser and Raleigh first became acquainted. We left Raleigh* in London after his return, in the *E. W." viii. 401, 402.

early summer of 1579, with his half-brother, Humphrey Gilbert, from an unsuccessful voyage of discovery, which, if the ships of the Spaniards had not been too strong for him, was to have led to the planting of a colony with Humphrey Gilbert for its governor, Gilbert, who had in former years

seen much service in Ireland and some in the Netherlands, after return from his baulked expedition served in the ships sent under Sir John Perrot to assist against the insurrection raised in Ireland by James Fitzmaurice. This brought him no advantage. He complained, after his return, that twentyseven years' service left him subject to daily arrests, executions, and outlawries. But he was labouring for means of carrying out his scheme of colonisation, and doing something before 1584, when the date of the powers granted by his charter would expire.

Walter Raleigh left England with what he describes, in a letter to Lord Burleigh, as "a foot band of a hundred men," who were engaged under Lord Justice Pelham against insurrection in Ireland. He was so employed when Arthur Lord Grey of Wilton became Lord Deputy. Raleigh, too, was a believer in the mercies of severity for quick suppression of rebellion. He went to Dublin to protest against leniency shown by Lord Grey to Lord Barry of Barry Court, in the county of Cork, and rode back with power to seize his castle and bring him to submission. Raleigh was attacked on the way by a numerous force waiting for him in ambush, and with the loss of his horse came, with all his men, safe out of a struggle in which he risked his life to save a friend from Devonshire, Henry Moyle, who had twice foundered in a bog. When Raleigh was unhorsed he for a time defended himself singly, with pistol and quarterstaff, against twenty assailants. By boldness of action he surprised Lord Barry in his castle, and carried him to Cork. Captain Raleigh was well known in the force at Smerwick Bay for his proved skill and daring.

John
Hooker.

It is not from the despatch of the Lord Deputy that we read of Raleigh's part in the massacre of the garrison, but from the edition of Holinshed's "Chronicles " published in 1586 as "now newlie augmented and continued (with manifold Matters of singular Note and worthie Memorie) to the year 1586, by John Hooker, alias Vowell, Gent. and others." It is John Hooker who says here that, on the day of the execution at Fort del Ore, "Captain Raleigh with Captain Mackworth entered into the Castle and made a great slaughter." His authority is good, for this continuer of Holinshed-uncle to the more famous Richard Hookerwas an Exeter man, son of a Robert Hooker who was Mayor of Exeter in 1529. John Hooker studied at Oxford, probably graduated in law, then travelled abroad. In 1555 he was elected the first Chamberlain of the City of Oxford. Soon afterwards he went to Ireland as solicitor to Sir Peter Carew, and in 1568 he sat in the Irish Parliament for Athenry. The section of Irish history which was one of the contributions of John Hooker to the continuation of Holinshed was dedicated to Sir Walter Raleigh, about whose actions, as a Devonshire neighbour, Hooker may have had information at first hand.

Raleigh
in Ireland:
1581.

In a confidential letter of the twenty-fifth of February, 1581, to the queen's principal secretary, Raleigh speaks impatiently of Thomas Butler, tenth Earl of Ormond, who was Governor of Munster and General of the Forces. Thomas Butler, then within a year of fifty, and called from his complexion the "Black Earl," was a boy of fourteen when he became Earl of Ormond, on his father's death by poison. He spent much of his youth in the English Court, and was the first of his line who became a Protestant. Desmond and he had their estates in Munster, and there was fierce feud between the families. When Ormond was appointed Military Governor

of Munster to crush the rebellion of the Desmonds, he claimed that in three months following March, 1580, he had put to the sword forty-six captains, eight hundred notorious traitors and malefactors, and four thousand other persons. In the letter of February, 1581, Raleigh complained that Ormond withheld from him the keeping of Barry Court, as if desiring to enrich himself thereby, and that a Butler-because of the hatred of the Geraldines to the Butlers-never can make peace in Munster. So, "after Her Majesty hath spent a hundred thousand pound more, she shall at last be driven by too dear experience to send an English President to follow these malicious traitors with fire and sword, neither respecting the alliance nor the nation. Would God, your Honour and Her Majesty, as well as my poor self understood how pitifully the service here goeth forward; considering that this man having now been Lord General of Munster now about two years, there are now at this instant a thousand traitors more than there were on the first day. Would God the service of Sir Humphrey Gilbert might be rightly looked into; who, with the third part of the garrison now in Ireland, ended a rebellion not much inferior to this in two months. Or would God his own behaviour were such in peace as it did not make his good service forgotten, and hold him from the service he is worthy of!" It had been in October, 1569, that Humphrey Gilbert, after he had defeated MacCarthy More, was placed in command of the province of Munster, and wrote to Sir Henry Sidney, then Lord Deputy, that he was determined to have neither parley nor peace with any rebel, as he was convinced that no conquered nation could be ruled with gentleness. It had been for his services in Munster that Humphrey Gilbert was knighted at Drogheda by Sir Henry Sidney.

Thomas Butler, Earl of Ormond, in April, 1581, declared himself weary of killing, and persuaded Elizabeth to try a

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