In Spain, high-placed beside the King, If honours, wealth, and peace could bring Whose good swords flashed through pass and glen His race, though now proscribed and banned, CHAPTER V. N the midst of all this wrack and ruin the shedragon, Elizabeth, died (March 24, 1603) and James the First came to the throne. By that time the Irish war was practically ended. The few Irish chiefs who until then had been keeping up a sort of desultory resistance, gave up the hopeless strife, and sought to get terms from the new monarch, praying that they might be admitted to the peace and allowed to retain possession of their lands. With some a settlement was made, but for O'Sullivan and O'Rourke there was no pardon. Life in their own country having thus become impossible to them, they were compelled to seek shelter in foreign lands. O'Sullivan sailed for Spain, where he was cordially welcomed by the king, who conferred on him rank, titles, and high honours, and accorded to him a considerable pension with which to support his dignity. While O'Sullivan was carrying on his brave and desperate but vain resistance to the overwhelming forces of the English crown, Her Majesty's Lords Justices issued at Cork a proclamation setting a price upon his head. The following is a part of the document : And it is also proclaymed that if any psn. or psons. of what degree or qualitie soever that shall unto the Lo. President bring the live body of that wicked and unnatural Traitor, Donell O'Sullyvane, als O'Sullyvane Beare, shall have sum of Three hundred pounds ster., and for the saide Donnell's head £200 ; and for the bodies of the persons undernamed, alive or dead, rateably as the same is laid down upon them and every one of them : For Mac Morris liveinge £300, for him deade £200. For Fitzthomas liveinge £100, for him deade, 100 marks. For Donell O'Sullyvane liveinge £200, for him deade, 100 marks. For the Knight of the Valley liveinge £100, for him deade. 100 marks. For John O'Connor £100, for him deade 100 marks. It does not appear that those offers of large rewards for assassinations produced any notable results. The authorities never got hold of Donal O'Sullivan "liveinge or deade." But the life of that heroic chieftain had a tragic ending. The manner of it is thus related by his cousin Don Philip,1 who was a witness of the occurrence, and to some extent, unwittingly, the occasion of it : But the last stroke of adverse fortune befel thus:-On the 16th day of the same month (July, 1608), O'Sullivan, Prince of Beare, in whom all the hopes of the Irish at that time were placed, unhappily perished in this manner: John Bath, an AngloIrishman, and one whom O'Sullivan held in very high esteemeven to the extent of taking him under his personal protection, bestowing many favours upon him, and even admitting him to his own table in the circle of his most intimate friends-quite ungrateful for such high favours, carried his presumption so far as that when a discussion arose touching some money advanced by O'Sullivan as a loan, he, Bath, dared to make unfavourable comparisons between a family, one of the most illustrious among the Irish, and the English, from whom he, himself, was sprung. Philip, the writer of this history, a cousin of O'Sullivan, unable to endure this insult, expostulated with Bath upon the matter. The dispute proceeded so far that they attacked each other with drawn swords, at a royal monastery not far from Madrid. In this contest, Bath, terror-stricken, kept retreating, shouting at the same time. Philip wounded him in the face, and, as it appears, would have slain him, had not Edmond O'Moore and Gerald McMorris (sent by O'Sullivan) and two Spanish Knights, protected him, and Philip would have been arrested by a constable but for their interference. When many were attracted to the spot by the quarrel, among others came 1 See Appendix O'Sullivan, a rosary in his left hand. Whilst thus incautious, fearing nothing, and looking in quite another direction, Bath approached him through the crowd, struck him through the left shoulder, and again piercing him through the throat, killed him. So perished one of the noblest Irishmen of his time. Of the members of his family who had accompanied him into exile an account is given by his cousin Don Philip in a Latin poem prefixed to his Catholic History, from which it appears that his (Philip's) father Dermot, uncle of Donal, died at the age of 100 years and was buried in the Franciscan Church at Corunna ; his mother followed soon after, and was interred in the same tomb; his sister Helena was drowned on a return voyage to Ireland, and another sister became a nun. Philip had in him the sea-going instinct that one might expect from a native of Dursey Island, and was also gifted. with literary talent and a love of learning. He entered the Spanish naval service, in which he rose to the rank of commander, and much of his literary work in defence of his race, his country, and his faith, was written on board ship. He must have been a lonely man towards the end of his life, his mind filled with memories of the past. Thomas Darcy McGee sketches the situation. in a pathetic ballad, from which I take the following verses: All alone-all alone, where the gladsome vine is growing- He is thinking-ever thinking of the hour he left Dunbuidhe, One sister is a black-veiled nun of St. Ursula in Spain; D All alone-all alone, where the gladsome vine is growing McGee gives to those pathetic verses the title of " The Last O'Sullivan Beare"; and Mr. Standish O'Grady, in a note to his edition of the Pacata Hibernia, bestows on Donal the same appellation. From the point of view of the chieftaincy it is quite correct, but not otherwise. It may be that there is not now a lineal descendant of the hero of Dunboy in the world; but his relatives were a numerous group, and in the O'Sullivan line were entitled to keep the affix to their names if they so pleased -as many of their descendants did up to recently and some do still. The kinsmen of Prince Donal did not all quit the country after his overthrow; they were not all killed; what happened was that they were robbed despoiled, disinherited; poverty and servitude were made the lot of men who had previously owned the fields they tilled, the pastures on which they grazed, their cattle, the vessels with which they fished the seas and traded with foreign countries. Some few members of the stock attorning to the new conditions, managed to retain portions of their former property, not indeed as chiefs, or proprietors, but rather as middlemen or small landlords. But, however broken their fortunes, they were still O'Sullivans Beare, and as such their names are written in various State papers and legal documents for more than a hundred years after the time of Donal of Dunboy. As time went on adverse circumstances told upon them all. The loyalty of the Irish gentlemen to their legitimate king, James II., their fidelity to the Catholic faith, their resistance to the infamous penal laws, wrought their ruin. The insatiable greed, the intolerable arrogance, the exasperating insults of their new masters, broke the hearts of the best men of the old race. They |