Essex’s first and natural impulse was ‘to revenge or follow worthy Conyers Clifford,’ but others thought that very little could be done. In early spring it had been decided to wait till the summer, and now in harvest-time the season for fighting was considered to be past. Again the General placed his fate in the hands of a council of war, and again his advisers resolved to do nothing. ‘The Lords, Colonels, and Knights of the army,’ as they style themselves, declared that there were less than 4,000 men available for a campaign, that many soldiers deserted to the rebels, ran away to England, feigned sickness, or hid themselves. The uniform ill-success of the Queen’s army had lately been such that her troops had no heart for the Ulster enterprise, and it was certain that they would be greatly outnumbered by the rebels. ‘The Connaught army consisting of a great part of old companies being lately defeated,’ there was no chance of establishing a post at Lough Foyle, and in any case there were not men enough to garrison it, and the same would apply still more strongly to Armagh and Blackwater, whither provisions could not be brought by sea. For these reasons, and being thoroughly aware of the state of the army, the officers declared against any journey far north. ‘In which resolution,’ they say, ‘if any man suspected it proceeded of weakness or baseness, we will not only in all likely and profitable service disprove him, but will every one of us deal with his life, that we dissuaded this undertaking with more duty than any man could persuade unto it.’ The Queen was very angry with the Lord Lieutenant for calling in ‘so many of those that are of so slender judgment, and none of our council,’ to keep men from censuring his proceedings, and there can be little doubt that it was a weak device to shift the responsibility. Seven days after the officers’ declaration, Essex left Dublin, resolved to go as far and do as much ‘as duty would warrant, and God enable him.’ This meant that he would fight Tyrone if the arch-rebel would forego his advantage of position and come out to battle. ‘If he have as much courage as he pretendeth, we will, on one side or the other, end the war.’ He had come to see that the ‘beating of Tyrone in the field’ depended upon the good pleasure of that chief, and it would have been well for his fame had he mastered that elementary truth before he undertook to censure better soldiers and wiser men than himself.[324]
Essex left Dublin on August 28, with the intention of placing a garrison at Donaghmoyne in Farney. That land of lakes and hills was his own inheritance by the Queen’s patent to his father, and he may have had some idea of securing his own as well as of annoying Tyrone. He travelled through Navan and Kells, and at Castle Keran, beyond the latter town, he mustered an army of 3,700 foot and 300 horse. But the idea of establishing an outpost either in Monaghan or Cavan was quickly abandoned for three reasons, any of which would have been ample by itself. It was not worth doing, since there was nothing to defend beyond Kells. It could not be done, because it would be impossible to bring provisions on horseback from Drogheda. Last and not least, Tyrone was in Farney, ready to burn the Pale up to Dublin gates as soon as the Lord Lieutenant’s rearguard had passed. It was resolved that Kells should be the frontier garrison, and the army marched to Ardee. The camp was so placed that Tyrone’s could be seen on the other side of the Lagan, and there was some small skirmishing when a party was sent down to cut firewood near the river. Next day Essex advanced to the Mills of Louth, and encamped on the left bank of the Lagan. Tyrone made a flank march at the same time, and the two armies were quite close together, the Irish keeping the woods, though 10,000 or 11,000 strong. Sir William Warren, who was used to treating with Tyrone, went to seek the enlargement of a prisoner, and next day Henry O’Hagan came to ask for a parley. ‘If thy master,’ Essex is reported to have said, ‘have any confidence either in the justness of his cause, or in the goodness and number of his men, or in his own virtue, of all which he vainly glorieth, he will meet me in the field so far advanced before the head of his kerne as myself shall be separated from the front of my troops, where we will parley in that fashion which best becomes soldiers.’ Vainglory there was, but rather upon the challenger’s own side; it was as a general, and not as a champion, that Elizabeth had sent her favourite to Ireland.[325]
Next day Essex offered battle, which of course was refused by the enemy, but Tyrone again sent to desire a parley. A garrison was placed at Newrath near the mill of Louth, and on the following day the army marched towards Drumcondra. They had scarcely gone a mile when O’Hagan came again, and ‘speaking,’ like Rabshakeh, ‘so loud as all might hear that were present,’ announced that Tyrone ‘desired her Majesty’s mercy, and that the Lord Lieutenant would hear him; which, if his lordship agreed to, he would gallop about and meet him at the ford of Bellaclinthe, which was on the right hand by the way which his lordship took to Drumcondra.’ Essex sent two officers to see the place, who reported that the ford was too wide for the purpose; but Tyrone, who knew the ground, found a spot ‘where he, standing up to his horse’s belly, might be near enough to be heard by the Lord Lieutenant, though he kept to the hard ground.... Seeing Tyrone there alone, his lordship went down alone. At whose coming Tyrone saluted his lordship with much reverence, and they talked above half-an-hour together, and after went either of them to their companies on the hills.’ Of all the foolish things Essex ever did, this was the most foolish. By conversing with the arch-rebel without witnesses he left it open to his enemies to put the worst construction on all he did, and he put it out of his own power to offer any valid defence. Two days before he had declared war to the knife, and now he was ready to talk familiarly with his enemy, and practically to concede all without striking a blow. A more formal meeting followed with six witnesses on each side. Tyrone’s were his brother Cormac MacBaron, Magennis, Maguire, Ever MacCowley, Henry Ovington, and Richard Owen, ‘that came from Spain, but is an Irishman by birth.’ Southampton, St. Leger, and four other officers of rank accompanied the Lord Lieutenant. By way of humility, the Irish party rode into the river, ‘almost to their horse’s bellies,’ while Essex and his followers kept on the bank. Tyrone spoke uncovered, saluting the viceregal party ‘with a great deal of respect,’ and it was arranged that a further conference should take place next morning. Essex continued his march to Drumcondra, but Tyrone came himself to the place of meeting—a ford where the Lagan bridge now stands. Wotton was one of the commissioners on the Lord Lieutenant’s part, and it is not likely that the negotiation suffered in his hands. He was chosen as the fittest person ‘to counterpoise the sharpness of Henry Ovington’s wit.’ The result was a cessation of arms for six weeks to six weeks until May, either side being at liberty to break it on giving fourteen days’ notice. If any of Tyrone’s allies refused to be bound, the Lord Lieutenant was left at liberty to attack them. To save Essex’s honour it was agreed to that his ratification should be by word simply, but that Tyrone’s should be on oath. Next day the Lord Lieutenant went to take physic at Drogheda, and Tyrone retired with all his forces into the heart of his country, having gained without fighting a greater victory than that of the Yellow Ford. Bagenal was defeated, the Earl of Essex was disgraced; one had lost his life, the other his reputation.[326]
‘If these wars end by treaty,’ Wotton had said on his first arrival, ‘the Earl of Tyrone must be very humble.’ But the wars were ended so far as Essex was concerned, and the rebels had conceded nothing. A week before his meeting with Tyrone, Essex had written to the Queen, warning her to expect nothing from a man weary of life, whose past services had been requited by ‘banishment and proscription into the most cursed of all countries,’ and almost suggesting that he meditated suicide as the only means of escape. Nor were Elizabeth’s letters such as to encourage him. He had disappointed the world’s expectation, and his actions had been contrary to her orders, ‘though carried in such sort as we were sure to have no time to countermand them.’ ‘Before your departure,’ she wrote, ‘no man’s counsel was held sound which persuaded not presently the main prosecution in Ulster; all was nothing without that, and nothing was too much for that.’ An army and a summer had been wasted, and nothing had been done. The only way of accounting for the way in which the available troops had dwindled from 19,000 to less than 4,000 was by supposing that he had dispersed them in unnecessary garrisons, ‘especially since, by your continual report of the state of every province, you describe them all to be in worse condition than ever they were before you put foot in that kingdom.’ He had condemned all his predecessors, he had had everything he asked for, and he had done worse than anyone. Two days after the despatch of this letter Elizabeth received the account of the truce with Tyrone, which she promptly characterised as the ‘quick end made of a slow proceeding.’ She had never doubted that Tyrone would be ready to parley ‘specially with our supreme general of the kingdom, having often done it with those of subaltern authority; always seeking these cessations with like words, like protestations.’ She blamed Essex severely for his private interview—not, she was careful to say, that she suspected treason; ‘yet both for comeliness, example, and your own discharge, we marvel you would carry it no better.’ He had neglected her orders and sheltered himself systematically behind a council which had already wrapped Ireland in calamities. If she had intended to leave all to them, it was ‘very superfluous to have sent over such a personage as yourself.’ His despatches were as meagre as his actions, and he had told her nothing of what passed between him and Tyrone, nor of his instructions to the commissioners, so that ‘we cannot tell, but by divination, what to think may be the issue of this proceeding... to trust this traitor upon oath is to trust a devil upon his religion. To trust him upon pledges is a mere illusory... unless he yield to have garrisons planted in his own country to master him, and to come over to us personally here.’ The letter concluded with a positive order not to ratify the truce, nor to grant a pardon without further authority from herself, ‘after he had particularly advised by writing.’ One week after the date of the letter Essex left Ireland, in spite of the most stringent orders not to do so without a special warrant.[327]
Some account of Tyrone, as he appeared among his own people near Dunkalk, has been fortunately preserved in a letter from Sir John Harrington, who was at once a keen observer and a lively writer, and who had already seen him at Ormonde’s house in London. Tyrone apologised for not remembering him personally, and said that the troubles had made him almost forget his friends. While the Earl was in private conversation with Sir William Warren, Harrington amused himself by ‘posing his two sons in their learning, and their tutors, which were one Friar Nangle, a Franciscan, and a younger scholar, whose name I know not; and finding the two children of good towardly spirit, their age between thirteen and fifteen, in English clothes like a nobleman’s sons; with velvet jerkins and gold lace; of a good cheerful aspect, freckle-faced, not tall of stature, but strong and well-set; both of them speaking the English tongue; I gave them (not without the advice of Sir William Warren) my English translation of Ariosto, which I got at Dublin; which their teachers took very thankfully, and soon after shewed it to the Earl, who called to see it openly, and would needs hear some part of it read. I turned (as it had been by chance) to the beginning of the forty-fifth canto, and some other passages of the book, which he seemed to like so well that he solemnly swore his boys should read all the book over to him.’ Harrington was not insensible to flattery of this sort, for he has recorded the reception of his work at Galway and its soothing effect upon ‘a great lady, a young lady, and a fair lady’ who had been jilted by Sir Calisthenes Brooke; but it did not prevent him from afterwards calling Tyrone a damnable rebel. It was O’Neill’s cue to speak fairly, and he took occasion to say that he had seen his visitor’s cousin, Sir Henry, in the field, and that he must have been wrongly accused of misconduct in the fight near Wicklow. Tyrone deplored his ‘own hard life,’ comparing himself to wolves, that ‘fill their bellies sometimes, and fast as long for it;’ but he was merry at dinner, and seemed rather pleased when Harrington worsted one of his priests in an argument. ‘There were fern tables and fern forms, spread under the stately canopy of heaven. His guard for the most part were beardless boys without shirts, who, in the frost, wade as familiarly through rivers as water-spaniels. With what charms such a master makes them love him I know not; but if he bid come, they come; if go, they do go; if he say do this, they do it.’ He made peaceable professions, and spoke much about freedom of conscience; but Harrington perceived that his only object was to temporise, and ‘one pretty thing I noted, that the paper being drawn for him to sign, and his signing it with O’Neill, Sir William (though with very great difficulty) made him to new write it and subscribe Hugh Tyrone.’[328]
The only possible excuse for Essex’s leaving Ireland against orders was the Queen’s last direction to ‘advise by writing’ the progress of his negotiations with Tyrone. He had given a promise—a foolish and rash promise—that he would ‘only verbally deliver’ the conditions demanded by the arch-rebel. A letter to Sir John Norris had been sent into Spain, and Tyrone refused to open his heart if writing was to be used. Essex could, however, refer to the instructions given by him to Warren, and in any case he might have waited until her Majesty had expressed her opinion as to his promise of secrecy. After all, the most probable supposition is that he was sick of Ireland, that he felt his own failure, and that he hoped to reassert over the Queen that power which absence had so evidently weakened. He swore in Archbishop Loftus and Sir George Carey as Lords Justices, Ormonde remaining in command of the army under his old commission, and charged them all to keep the cessation precisely, but to stand on their guard and to have all garrisons fully victualled for six months. He sailed the same day, and travelled post, with the evident intention of himself announcing his departure from Ireland. Having embarked on the 24th, he reached London very early on the 28th, hurried to the ferry between Westminster and Lambeth, and appropriated the horses which he found waiting there. Lord Grey de Wilton, who had not forgiven his arrest, was in front, and it was proposed by Sir Thomas Gerrard that he should let the Earl pass him. ‘Doth he desire it?’ said Lord Grey. ‘No,’ was the answer, ‘nor will he, I think, ask anything at your hands.’ ‘Then,’ said his lordship, ‘I have business at Court.’ He hurried on to Nonsuch, and went straight to Cecil.[329] Essex arrived only a quarter of an hour later, and although ‘so full of dirt and mire that his very face was full of it,’ made his way at once to the Queen’s bedchamber. It was ten o’clock, and Elizabeth was an early riser, but on this occasion she was ‘newly up, the hair about her face.’ He fell on his knees and kissed her hands, and the goodness of his reception was inferred from his own words that, ‘though he had suffered much trouble and storm abroad, he found a sweet calm at home.’ He dressed, and at eleven had another audience, which lasted an hour. Still all went well. The Queen was gracious, and the courtiers as yet saw no reason to stand aloof; but Cecil and his friends were thought to be rather cold. Elizabeth was evidently glad to see her favourite, and for a moment forgot his real position. The first meeting of the Privy Council dispelled the illusion, and on the 1st of October he was committed to the custody of Lord-Keeper Egerton.[330]
It was very uncertain as to what would be the consequences of Essex’s escapade, and those who were left in charge could only temporise as best they might. In about two months Sir William Warren had three separate parleys with Tyrone, and in each case it was the English diplomatist that urged a continuance of the cessation of arms. Tyrone, who had his immediate followers extraordinarily well in hand, seems to have kept the truce, and he had reasons to complain of injuries done him by the English party. In the paralysis of government outrage upon the borders could scarcely be avoided, and Tyrone’s allies were less steady than himself. ‘In all the speeches,’ Warren wrote, ‘passed between him and me, he seemed to stand chiefly upon a general liberty of religion throughout the kingdom. I wished him to demand some other thing reasonable to be had from her Majesty, for I told him that I thought her Majesty would no more yield to that demand than she would give her crown from her head.’ Warren laughed at a letter addressed to Lord O’Neill Chief Lieutenant of Ireland. ‘I asked him,’ he says, ‘to whom the devil he could be Lieutenant. He answered me, Why should I not be a Lieutenant as well as the Earl of Ormonde.’ The reasoning is not very clear, and it seems at least probable that many regarded him as the Pope’s viceroy. In making James Fitzthomas an earl he had greatly exceeded even the most ample viceregal powers. From the meeting with Essex to the date at which he resolved to begin fighting again, his official letters are signed Hugh Tyrone, but on November 8 he gave Warren fourteen days’ notice to conclude the truce, on the ground of injuries done him by Thomond and Clanricarde. That letter and those succeeding it, with one significant exception, he signs as O’Neill. In repeating the notice to Ormonde he says, ‘I wish you command your secretary to be more discreet and to use the word Traitor as seldom as he may. By chiding there is little gotten at my hands, and they that are joined with me fight for the Catholic religion, and liberties of our country, the which I protest before God is my whole intention.’ In all these negotiations Tyrone professes to rely entirely upon Essex to see justice done, and declares war ‘first of all for having seven score of my men killed by the Earl of Ormonde in time of cessation, besides divers others of the Geraldines, who were slain by the Earl of Kildare. Another cause is because I made my agreement only with your lordship, in whom I had my only confidence, who, as I am given to understand, is now restrained from your liberty, for what cause I know not.’ And this letter, being intended for English consumption, is signed Hugh Tyrone. Immediately after writing it he again took the field.[331]
‘The conditions demanded by Tyrone,’ says Essex himself, ‘I was fain to give my word that I would only verbally deliver.’ The consequence was that there is not and cannot be any absolutely authentic statement of those conditions. There is, however, a paper printed in a collection of repute, and immediately after one of Cecil’s letters, which professes to be a statement of ‘Tyrone’s Propositions, 1599.’ The Queen herself says that Essex, on his return, acquainted her with Tyrone’s offers, but in so confused a manner as could only be explained by supposing that ‘the short time of their conference made him not fully conceive the particular meaning of Tyrone in divers of those articles.’ What probably happened was that Tyrone talked big, and that when Essex came to think over it afterwards, he could not clearly distinguish between extreme claims which had been mentioned, and serious proposals which had been made. But the 16th article in ‘Tyrone’s Propositions’ is clearly not invented by the writer, who was probably hostile to Essex. It demands ‘that O’Neill, O’Donnell, Desmond, and their partakers, shall have such lands as their ancestors enjoyed 200 years ago.’ Whether Tyrone ever demanded any such thing is doubtful, but it is certain that this, or something very like it, was what Essex told the Queen. ‘Tyrone’s offers,’ she says, ‘are both full of scandal to our realm, and future peril in the State. What would become of all Munster, Leix, and Offaly, if all the ancient exiled rebels be restored to all that our laws and hereditary succession have bestowed upon us?’ And again, ‘we will not assent in other provinces [than Ulster] to the restitution of all traitors to their livings, or the displantation of our subjects that have spent their lives in the just defences of their possessions which they have taken and held from us or our ancestors.’ It is quite evident then that Essex actually laid before Elizabeth a proposal which involved the reversal of every attainder and the expropriation of all settlers upon forfeited lands. After this it hardly seems worth discussing matters of commerce, or proposals that Englishmen should be debarred from all preferment in Church and State in Ireland, while all statutes prejudicing the preferment of Irishmen in England should be repealed.’[332]
Liberty of conscience was what Tyrone continually asked for, but not what he or his friends were prepared to grant. He undertook generally to ‘plant the Catholic faith throughout Ireland,’ and when did Rome bear a rival near her throne? In a letter to the King of Spain he acknowledged his object to be the ‘extirpation of heresy,’ and recalcitrant chiefs were reminded that present ruin and eternal damnation would be their lot if they did not help to ‘erect the Catholic religion.’ Jesuits boasted that his victories had already made it impossible for Protestants to live in certain districts. Tyrone claimed personal inviolability for priests, and treated the imprisonment of one as a breach of the cessation. In the paper already discussed he is said to have demanded that the Catholic religion should be openly preached, the churches governed by the Pope, cathedrals restored, Irish priests released from prison and left free to come and go over sea, and that no Englishmen should be churchmen in Ireland. The article about the release of clerical prisoners is just such a coincidence as Paley would have urged in proof that ‘Tyrone’s Propositions’ form a genuine document. But here again it is probable that this was only laid before the Queen as Tyrone’s extreme claim, and that Essex gave her some reason to suppose that he would be satisfied with less. ‘For any other personal coming of himself,’ she wrote, ‘or constraint in religion, we can be content, for the first, that he may know he shall not be peremptorily concluded, and in the second that we leave to God, who knows best how to work his will in these things, by means more fit than violence, which doth rather obdurate than reform. And, therefore, as in that case he need not to dread us, so we intend not to bind ourselves further for his security than by our former course we have witnessed; who have not used rigour in that point, even when we might with more probability have forced others.’[333]
FOOTNOTES:
[300] Parallel between Essex and Buckingham in Reliquiæ Wottonianæ.
[301] Reliquiæ Wottonianæ; Camden; Essex to the Queen in Devereux’s Earls of Essex, i. 493. The letter quoted in the text is the best proof that Camden’s story is substantially true. See also Spedding’s Life of Bacon, ii. 91, 103. For Spanish popular notions on Philip III. see Carew, Aug. 23, 1602. Beaumont, the French ambassador in 1602, says the Queen told him, in a broken voice, that she had warned Essex long since ‘qu’il se contestast de prendre plaisir de lui déplaire à toutes occasions, et de mepriser sa personne insolemment comme il faisait, et qu’il se gardast bien de toucher à son sceptre.’—Von Raumer, Letter 60.
[302] Spedding, ii. 124-126; Essex to John Harrington in Park’s edition of Nugæ Antiquæ, i. 246.
[303] Bacon’s advice to Essex immediately before his going to Ireland, Spedding, ii. 129; Essex to Southampton, Jan. 1, 1599, printed by Abbott; Bacon’s Apology, first printed in 1604.
[304] The letter of advice is in Spedding, ii. 129; Apology concerning the Earl of Essex; Essex to Southampton in Abbott’s Bacon and Essex, chap. ix. Jan. 1, 1599. Essex wrote to the Queen, just before starting, as follows: ‘From a mind delighting in sorrow, from spirits wasted with passion, from a heart torn with care, grief, and travail, from a man that hateth himself and all things also that keepeth him alive, what service can your Majesty expect? since my service past deserves no more than banishment and proscription into the cursedst of all other countries.’ The letter ends with some verses in praise of a contemplative life, and Essex signs himself ‘your Majesty’s exiled servant.’—MS. Harl. 35, p. 338.
[305] The progress of the negotiations may be traced in Chamberlain’s Letters (Camden Society). Essex to Southampton, Jan. 1, 1599; and Charles Blount (afterwards Lord Mountjoy) to Essex, Jan. 3, both in Abbott, chap. ix.
What hell it is in suing long to bide;
To lose good days that might be better spent
To waste long nights in pensive discontent;
To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow, &c.’—Spenser.
[306] Devereux, ii. 16-24; Four Masters; Prayer for the good success of Her Majesty’s forces in Ireland (black letter, London, 1599).
(As in good time he may), from Ireland coming,
Bringing rebellion broached on his sword,
How many would the peaceful city quit,
To welcome him?—Henry V. Act 5.
[307] Chamberlain’s Letters, 1599. Robert Markham to John Harrington in Nugæ Antiquæ, i. 239; Fenton to Cecil, May 7; Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary, part i. book i. ch. i. At Hatfield there are a great many letters asking Essex to employ the writers or their friends in Ireland. Most of these anticipate triumph. William Harborn on Feb. 3 asks for nothing, but presents the Earl with an Italian history of the world in four volumes, ‘to attend your honour, if they be permitted, in this your pretended Irish enterprise, at times vacant to recreate your most heroical mind.’ The Queen’s instructions speak of a ‘royal army, paid, furnished, and provided in other sorts than any king of this land hath done before.’ Its nominal strength was raised to 20,000, but they were never really under arms at once.
[308] The Commission, dated March 12, is in Morrin’s Patent Rolls, ii. 520. The instructions, dated March 27, are fully abstracted by Devereux, and in Carew.
[309] Chichester to Cecil, March 17, 1599, MS. Hatfield. Account of Sir Arthur Chichester by Sir Faithful Fortescue in Lord Clermont’s privately printed Life of Sir John Fortescue, &c.
[310] Report on state of Ireland April 1599, in Carew, and further particulars in Dymmok’s Treatise of Ireland (ed. Butler, Irish Arch. Society, 1843). Dymmok’s account of the Leinster and Munster journey is, with slight omissions, word for word (but better spelt) Harrington’s journal from May 10 to July 3, after which it is continued from other sources. (Nugæ Antiquæ, i. 268-292.) There is an independent journal in Carew from May 21 to July 1. The opinion of the Irish Council is printed by Devereux, i. 24. Essex to the Privy Council, April 29. Sir H. Wotton to Ed. Reynolds, April 19, MS. Hatfield, where it is noted that Sir H. Wallop died within an hour of the Lord Lieutenant’s arrival.
[311] Nugæ Antiquæ, i. 269-275; Four Masters; O’Sullivan Bere, tom. iii. lib. v. cap. 9. O’Donovan cannot exactly identify the ‘transitus plumarum,’ and the name is forgotten in the district. Harrington places it between Croshy Duff hill, which is two and a half miles from Maryborough on the Timahoe road, and Cashel, which is four miles from Maryborough on the Ballyroan road. Captain Lee, in Desiderata Curiosa Hibernica, i. 114, suggests that Tyrone would willingly settle all his differences with Bagenal (whom he very wrongly accuses of cowardice) by a duel. Tyrone was the last man in the world to do such an act of folly, but Lee exposes his own character.
[312] The Lord President, Ormonde, and other councillors ‘hath persuaded me for a few days to look into his government.’—Essex to the Privy Council, May 21, 1599, MS. Hatfield. The few days were a full month. Nugæ Antiquæ, i. 275-278; Journal of occurrents in Carew, under June 22. The battery was planted on May 28, and all was over by the 31st. ‘The castle of Cahir, very considerable, built upon a rock, and seated in an island in the midst of the Suir, was lately rendered to me. It cost the Earl of Essex, as I am informed, about eight weeks’ siege with his army and artillery. It is now yours without the loss of one man.’—Cromwell to Bradshaw, March 5, 1649. Thus history is falsified by flattery and local vanity. There is a picture-plan of the siege in Pacata Hibernia.
[313] Journal of occurrents in Carew, under June 22; Nugæ Antiquæ, i. 278-280. The Journal, the Four Masters, and O’Sullivan Bere, tom. iii. lib. v. cap. 6, all agree that Norris died of a wound in the head. ‘Kilthilia’ may be Kilteely near Hospital, whither the Journal says the wounded man was first carried. He died in his own house at Mallow.
[314] Nugæ Antiquæ and Journal ut sup. Essex left Askeaton on the 8th, and arrived at Waterford on June 21. The Queen to Lord and Lady Norris, Sept. 6, in S.P. Domestic, and Rowland Whyte to Sir R. Sidney, Sept. 8, in Sidney Papers.
[315] The contemporary accounts are collected in National MSS. of Ireland, part iv. i. app. xiv. Atherton’s is the most minute. There is also a field-sketch made by Captain Montague. The Irish were not numerically stronger than Harrington’s force. Loftus, who died at Wicklow for want of a skilful surgeon, was the archbishop’s son.
[316] Journal in Carew, under July 1; Nugæ Antiquæ, i. 254, 259, and 286-292; Dymmok’s Treatise. Essex left Waterford June 22, and reached Dublin July 2.
[317] Essex to the Privy Council, July 11; Devereux, ii. 50-52; Fynes Moryson, part ii. lib. i. cap. i.; Nugæ Antiquæ, i. 292; Reliquiæ Wottonianæ.
[318] Privy Council to Essex, June 10; Essex to the Privy Council, July 11; the Queen to Essex, July 19.
[319] Essex to the Privy Council, May 21, MS. Hatfield; Cecil to Sir H. Neville, May 23, in Winwood’s Memorials; Chamberlain’s Letters, June 10; Essex to the Queen, June 25, in Moryson; the Queen to Essex, July 19.
[320] Dymmok’s Treatise, p. 43; Nugæ Antiquæ, i. 255; the Queen to Essex, July 19 and Aug. 10. Harrington’s comrade was Gerald, fourteenth Earl of Kildare. The ‘sergeant-major’ was either Captain Richard Cuny or Captain George Flower.
[321] The Queen to the Lord Lieutenant and Council, Aug. 10 in Carew; Chamberlain’s Letters, Aug. 23.
[322] Dymmok’s Treatise, p. 44; Nugæ Antiquæ, i. 255-257 and 264-268; Four Masters. Harrington was present, and Dymmok’s account is from those who were. O’Sullivan Bere says the English lost 1,400 men, but Harrington says Clifford’s whole force hardly amounted to that number. O’Donnell, though not far off, took no actual part in the fight. H. Cuffe to E. Reynolds, Aug. 11, MS. Hatfield, written when the bad news was quite fresh.
[323] Four Masters; MacDermot’s letter is in Dymmok; Essex’s instructions for Dillon, Savage, and Dunkellin in Carew, Aug. 10. Dymmok gives Aug. 15 as the date of Clifford’s death, but it must have been a week earlier.
[324] Essex to the Queen, soon after Aug. 15, in Devereux, ii. 56, and two other letters at p. 67. The officers’ declaration is at p. 55, where the names of the signatories are given. They fairly justify the Queen’s stricture in her letter of Sept. 14.
[325] Dymmok’s Treatise; Journal in Carew, No. 315. The two accounts substantially agree. It was the hereditary privilege of O’Hagan to inaugurate O’Neill.
[326] Journal in Carew and Dymmok ut sup. Moryson and Camden closely agree. The chronology is as follows: Essex leaves Dublin Aug. 28; musters at Castle Kieran, Aug. 31; between Robinstown and Newcastle, Sept. 2; Ardee, Sept. 3; Mills of Louth, Sept. 4; O’Hagan’s first overtures, Sept. 5; the meeting at Bellaclinthe, Sept. 7; cessation concluded, Sept. 8; Essex goes to Drogheda, Sept. 9. See also Shirley’s Monaghan, p. 104. There is a story told somewhere that Tyrone spoke much of religion, and that Essex answered, ‘Go to, thou carest as much for religion as my horse.’ The original articles of cessation, dated Sept. 8 and signed Hugh Tyrone, are at Hatfield.
[327] Essex to the Queen, Aug. 30, from Ardbraccan; the Queen to Essex. Sept. 14 and 17—all printed by Devereux. On March 27, Essex had licence at his own request ‘to return to her Majesty’s presence at such times as he shall find cause,’ but this was revoked by her letter of July 30. Sir H. Wotton to E. Reynolds, April 19, MS. Hatfield.
[328] Harrington to Justice Carey in Nugæ Antiquæ, i. 247. Park gives April as the date of this letter, but this is disproved by internal evidence, and it certainly belongs to October. See also ib. pp. 260 and 340. Warren’s own account of his ‘second journey to the Earl of Tyrone,’ is dated Oct. 20. The first lines of the 45th canto of Harrington’s translation of Orlando are:—
The climbing wight on her unstable wheel,
So much the higher may a man expect
To see his head where late he saw his heel, &c.
[329] Sir Christopher St. Lawrence, according to Camden, offered his services to kill both the peer and the secretary.
[330] Letters from Rowland Whyte to Sir Robert Sidney in Sidney Papers, ii. 117, 127, from Sept. 19 to Oct. 2; Essex’s Relation, written by him during his imprisonment.
[331] The letter to Essex is of Nov. 22, and with seventeen others belonging to the last three months of 1599, is printed by Mr. Gilbert in App. 16 to National Manuscripts, Ireland, part iv. 1. In a letter of Nov. 6, to the Lords Justices, Lord Lieutenant (Ormonde), and Council, the Queen approves of the slaughter by Ormonde ‘in revenge of that that brake the cessation in Wexford... do not irritate nor oppress any such as have submitted ... in respect of any private unkindness of your own.’
[332] ‘Tyrone’s Propositions, 1599’ are in Winwood’s Memorials, i. 118, immediately after Cecil’s letter of Oct. 8 to Neville, and are reprinted by Spedding and Abbott. The letter does not mention any enclosure. In Bacon and Essex, pp. 134-148, Dr. Abbott endeavours, not very successfully, I think, to show that the document is entirely unworthy of credit. It is, however, not called ‘Essex’s propositions,’ but ‘Tyrone’s,’ and I have shown that the most outrageous part of it was regarded by the Queen as a serious proposal. Essex should have broken off the conference at the mere mention of such a thing. Sidney would have done so, or Norris, or Mountjoy. The Queen’s letters to Fenton and to the Lords Justices, &c., are of Nov. 5 and 6.
[333] The Queen to the Lords Justices, &c. Nov. 6; Tyrone to Warren, Dec. 25; to the King of Spain, Dec. 31; to Lord Barry and others, Feb. 1600, in Carew. On Feb. 13, 1600, the Vicar Apostolic Hogan told Lord Barry he had ‘received an excommunication from the Pope against all those that doth not join in this Catholic action.’ James Archer, S.J., in a letter of Aug. 10, 1598, printed in Hibernia Ignatiana, p. 39, informs Aquaviva of ‘frequentes Catholicorum victorias, unde fit ut hæretici ex multis locis migrare cogantur.’ For Henry Fitzimon, S.J., the priest of whose imprisonment Tyrone complained, see his Life by Rev. E. Hogan, S.J., p. 209. ‘I never went to Tyrone,’ Warren wrote to Cecil, on Dec. 24, 1599, ‘but I was forced to bribe his Friars and Jesuits.’
CHAPTER XLIX.
GOVERNMENT OF MOUNTJOY, 1600.
In October 1599 the government of Ireland was offered to Mountjoy, who refused it. He may have thought that Essex would have to go back, or he may have been unwilling to leave Lady Rich. But in the following month he was nevertheless ordered to be ready within twenty days. It became evident that Essex would not be employed again; he made Mountjoy and Southampton guardians of his interests, and for his sake they both went perilously near to treason. Mountjoy undertook the thankless office with a heavy heart. He told the Queen that everyone of his predecessors had without exception been blamed, and that there was no one in Ireland whom he could trust. Very unjustly, he included even Ormonde in this sweeping censure. It was Raleigh who had insisted that he should be appointed, and the Queen listened chiefly to him about Irish affairs. ‘This employment of me is by a private man that never knew what it was to divide public and honourable ends from his own, propounded and laboured to you (without any respect to your public service) the more eagerly, by any means to rise to his long expected fortune. Wherein, by reason of the experience I have heard your Majesty holds him to have in that country, he is like to become my judge, and is already so proud of this plot that he cannot keep himself from bragging of it.’[334]