rents should be forfeited and vested in the Queen; and the 4th section thus concludes:- "And, most gracious and our redoubted Sovereign Lady, albeit that the said Lords and Captains be not able to justify themselves in the eye of the law for the undutiful adhering to the said traitor, O'Neill, in the execution of his false and traitorous attempts against your Majesty, your crown and dignity; yet having regard to his great tyranny, which he used over them, and the mistrust of your Majesty's earnest following the war, to deliver them from his tyrannical bondage, as you have most graciously and honourably done, we must think, that rather fear than any good devotion moved the most part of them to stand so long of his side, which is partly verified in that, that many of them came unto your Majesty's said Deputy long before the death of the said traitor; and that after his decease, Tirrelaghe Leinagh, whom the country hath elected to be O'Neill, and all the rest of the said lords and captains, came, of their own voluntary accord, into the presence of your Majesty's said Deputy, being then in Ulster, and there, with signs and tokens of great repentance, did humbly submit themselves, their lives and lands, into your Majesty's hands, craving your mercy and favour, with solemn oaths and humble submissions in writing, never to swerve from that their professed loyalty and fidelity to your imperial Crown of England. And therefore, we, your Majesty's ancient, obedient, true and faithful subjects of this, your realm of Ireland, with these, your strayed and new-reconciled people, fleeing now unto the wings of your grace and mercy, as their only refuge, most humbly and lowly make our humble petition unto your most excellent Majesty, that it would please the same to behold with your pitiful eyes the long endured misery of your said strayed people, and

rather with easy remission, than with due correction, to look unto their offences past, and not only to extend unto them your gracious pardon of their lives, but also to have such merciful consideration of them, as each according to his degree and good hope of desert may receive of your most bounteous liberality such portion of their said several countries to live in by English tenure and profitable reservations, as to your Majesty shall seem good and convenient; in the distribution whereof your Highness' said Deputy is best able to inform your Majesty, as one which, by great search and travail, doth know the quantity of the said countries, the nature of the soils, the quality of the people, the diversity of their lineages, and which of them hath best deserved your Majesty's favour to be extended in this behalf."

Notwithstanding this Act, on the 20th January, 1570, a concord and peace was made between the Queen and Turlough Luineach O'Neill, who appears, though with diminished territory and power, to have succeeded to the ancient chieftainry of his clan.*

In the case of Shane O'Neill, the character and conduct both of the English Government and the Celtic chiefs are displayed in the clearest light. The policy of conciliation was gradually giving way to the desire of Anglicizing the native inhabitants; and, as against a chief who resisted this process, no act of violence, fraud, or treachery was deemed illegitimate. The leading native chief aimed at establishing his ancient supremacy in utter disregard of the changed condition of things, and, uninfluenced either by patriotism or religion, staked his existence in the attempt. at once to resist foreign dominion, and crush into obedience his traditional vassals; the lesser chiefs, equally regardless of country, sought only to maintain their local indepen

* Carew MSS., vol. i., p. 404.

dence, and hailed the English as deliverers; as the Achæan league was the ally of Rome in the wars against the later Kings of Macedon.

The exultation of the English Government must have been modified by the consideration of the expense involved. From the 5th and 6th of Philip and Mary to the 16th of Elizabeth, the expenditure of the Irish Government amounted to £490,779 78. 63d., of which £120,000 represented the Irish receipts, and £370,779 78. 6d. at the yearly average of £23,179, was transmitted from England.* Shane O'Neill was 66 a barbarian and a rebel;" he is accused of innumerable acts of tyranny and violence; yet, was the condition of Tyrone or Ulster worse than that of the rest of Ireland? What lords holding of the Crown could then do, and were permitted then to do, may be learned from the contemporary conduct of the Earls of Ormond and Desmond.

On the 20th April, 1567, Sir Henry Sydney thus describes the state of Munster :-“ As touching the estate of the whole country, for so much as I saw of it, having travelled from Youghall to Cork, from Cork to Kinsale, and from thence to the uttermost bounds of it, towards Limerick, like as I never was in a more pleasant country in all my life, so never saw I a more waste and desolate land; no, not in the confines of other countries where actual war hath been continually kept by the greatest princes of Christendom; and there heard I such lamentable cries, and doleful complaints made by that small remain of poor people which yet are left, who (hardly) escaping the fury of the sword and fire of their outrageous neighbours, or the famine which the same, or their extortious lords, hath driven them unto (either by taking their goods from them, or by spending the same, by their ex

*Carew MSS., vol. i., r. 484.

tort taking of coyne and livery) make demonstration of the miserable estate of that country. Besides this, such horrible and lamentable spectacles there are to behold, as the burning of villages, the ruin of churches, the wasting of such as have been good towns and castles yea, the view of the bones and sculls of your dead subjects, who partly by murder, partly by famine, have died in the fields, as, in troth, hardly any Christian with dry eyes could behold. Not long before my arrival there, it was credibly reported that a principal servant of the Earl of Desmounde, after that he had burnt sundry villages, and destroyed a great piece of a country, there were certain poor women sought to have been rescued, but too late; yet so soon after the horrible fact committed, as their children were felt and seen to stir in the bodies of their dead mothers; and yet did the same earl lodge and banquet in the house of the same murderer, his servant, after the fact committed. Surely there was never people that lived in more misery than they do, nor, as it should seem, of worse minds; for matrimony amongst them is no more regarded in effect than conjunction between unreasonable beasts; perjury, robbery, and murder, counted allowable. Finally, I cannot find that they make any conscience of sin; and doubtless, I doubt whether they christen their children or no, for neither find I place where it should be done, nor any person able to instruct them in the rules of a Christian; or, if they were taught, I see no grace in them to follow it; and, when they die I cannot see they make any account of the world to come.'

Perhaps, if tested by the conduct of his contemporaries, Shane O'Neill has been harshly judged.

* Sydney to the Queen, 20th April, 1567. Hamilton, Calendar p. 330, No. 66; Carew MSS., vol. iii., p. lviii.

LECTURE VIII.

THE DESMOND WAR, AND THE PLANTATION OF MUNSTER. By the death of Shane O'Neill all obstacles to the extension of English power seemed to have been removed; the Anglicizing process, so long and steadily pursued, was to be accelerated and completed. English law and order were to be observed in the remotest districts; not only in the external ritual, but in religious belief, the nations were to be assimilated, the wastes and savage districts were to be peopled by English settlers, the favourites at once and maintainers of Royal authority. Ireland was to be a second England, but not a living, healthy England, inhabited by a free people, ruled according to established law, and yielding a willing obedience to a constitutional Sovereign, but such an England as the Tudors desired that England should be, in which the Sovereign's will or caprice was supreme, in which every subject, with slavish adulation upon his lips, altered his creed, political and religious, with the opinions of the ruler; in which all that was best and noblest in the English character, was dwarfed or extinguished. If the English Government was thus excited by hope of success, they were also urged forward by the dread of imminent peril. In 1569, Pius the Fifth by his Bull not only excommunicated Elizabeth, but affected to deprive her of the sovereignty; such Bulls had been often issued by the Pope's prede