was no truth in this. He was confined to that part of Kerry which lies north of Castlemaine and to the mountainous corner of Cork where the Blackwater rises. Ormonde was pretty confident that he would be captured, and none of the protected men relapsed except Goran MacSwiney, a captain of gallowglasses. Orders were sent to reduce the army in Munster from 1,000 to 600, and to prepare, if possible, for a further reduction to 200. On the very day that this order was penned Lord Roche was able to announce that he had very nearly taken Desmond, and that he had actually taken his chaplain, who was not so well horsed as the rest. ‘I would,’ Ormonde wrote to Burghley, ‘this chaplain and I were for one hour with you in your chamber, that you might know the secrets of his heart, which by fair means or foul he must open unto me.’ The poor man was coupled with a handlock to one of Ormonde’s servants, so that no one could speak to him privately. And thus the hunted chief was deprived of his last adviser.104
On November 1, Goran MacSwiney was killed, and Ormonde proceeded to discharge 110 foot and 12 horse. Even yet a few desperate men adhered to Desmond, and he might have long eluded his pursuers but for an outrage done in his name. On November 9, he sent twenty men on a plundering expedition to the south side of Tralee Bay, and they drove off forty cows and some horses belonging to Maurice O’Moriarty, whose house they robbed, and whose wife and children they barbarously stripped naked. Next day, having first asked leave from Lieutenant Stanley at Dingle, the O’Moriarties, with near a score of kerne and some half-dozen soldiers of the garrison of Castlemaine, traced the lost cattle to the woods of Glanageenty, about five miles to the east of Tralee. Owen O’Moriarty climbed the hill by moonlight, and looking down into the deep glen saw a fire beneath him, which was found to proceed from a cabin. The hut was surrounded, and at daybreak the O’Moriarties entered. Taken unawares and but half-awake, Desmond’s companion only thought of escaping, and he was left behind and wounded in the arm with a sword-cut by a soldier named Daniel O’Kelly. ‘I am the Earl of Desmond,’ he cried, ‘save my life!’ ‘Thou hast killed thyself long ago,’ said Owen O’Moriarty, and now thou shalt be prisoner to the Queen’s Majesty and the Earl of Ormonde, Lord General of Munster.’ They carried him some distance, but a rescue was imminent, and Owen ordered O’Kelly to strike off the prisoner’s head, since it was impossible to fight thus encumbered. The soldier obeyed, and the head was carried to Castlemaine, and from thence to Ormonde at Kilkenny. The ghastly trophy was by him sent to the Queen. As the best evidence against those who ‘spoke malicious lies touching the service and state of Munster,’ it was exposed on London Bridge. The like exposure at Cork was designed for the headless trunk, but friendly hands hid it for eight weeks, and finally deposited it in a neighbouring chapel where only Fitzgeralds were buried, and which is still called ‘the church of the name.’105
The spot where Desmond was decapitated is marked by a mound, and retains the name of Bothar-an-Iarla, or the Earl’s way. A gigantic elder formerly overshadowed the place, and in our own day it is covered by a young oak, a holly, and a bright tangle of ferns and foxgloves. A good carriage-road runs through the once inaccessible glen, and marks the difference between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Desmond’s death closes the mediæval history of Munster, and it is no wonder that much legendary glory attaches to his name. He was a man of little talent or virtue, though he need not be too severely condemned for refusing to see that the days of feudal or tribal independence were over. But the past has an irresistible attraction for Irish sentiment, and the popular ear is more readily opened to fable than to historical truth. With nothing heroic about him, the unhappy Earl is still honoured as a hero; but even the fidelity of tradition to his memory is less than that of the natives to him while he yet lived. Let thus much be said in honour of the poor kerne, who stood so staunchly in a doubtful cause. The Earl’s ghost, mounted on a phantom steed with silver shoes, is said sometimes to rise at night from the waters of Lough Gur; and when the west wind comes up fitfully from the sea and makes slates and windows rattle, the Kerry people still call upon travellers to listen to the Desmond howl.106
CHAPTER XL.
GOVERNMENT OF PERROTT, 1583-1584
As early as December 1582, Sir John Perrott had been spoken of as Grey’s successor. His actual appointment was, however, deferred for more than a year, Loftus and Wallop continuing to act as Lords Justices till June 1584. They were fortunate in seeing the end of the Desmond rebellion, but less so in having to deal with those who had been engaged in it. Lady Desmond, in her poverty, subsisted upon a pension allowed her by Ormonde, until the Queen’s pleasure should be known; and the protections which he had given to the seneschal of Imokilly, Patrick Condon, and other leaders, were respected. Wallop did not like the Lord-General, but he did not thwart him seriously. Piers Grace, an old and notorious offender in the Kilkenny district, was pardoned at the Earl’s intercession, and the Lords Justices observed that they would not have done it for anyone else.107
In 1581, after the death of Fitzgibbon, Gregory XIII. appointed Dermod O’Hurley to the Archbishopric of Cashel. He had spent fifteen years at Louvain and four at Rheims, and he was deeply engaged in the plans of Irish exiles against Elizabeth’s government. We get a glimpse of him at Rome not long after his appointment, and find him, like his predecessor, occupied in schemes for the invasion of Ireland. The caution of the Italian ecclesiastic is, as usual, contrasted with the sanguine temper of the exiles. Christopher Barnewall, who had been sent to the Continent by Baltinglas, was introduced by O’Hurley to Cardinal Como, and informed him that Kildare and Delvin were in prison, though both had served against the Wicklow rebels. ‘Who,’ said the Cardinal, with an expressive shrug, ‘would trust an Irishman? The Earl promised to take our part.’ O’Hurley thought he had not gone so far. ‘Wilt thou tell me?’ answered the Italian angrily, and produced a letter from Kildare and a document signed by most of the Lords of Ulster, Munster, and Connaught, which made his view good. ‘Do you think,’ he said, ‘that we would have trusted to James Fitzmaurice and Stukeley, or to all these lords which subscribed the great letter, unless we had received this letter from the Earl of Kildare? The Pope has no money for any of your nation.’108
O’Hurley landed at Drogheda in September, 1583, bringing letters from Rome with him. He was harboured by Lord Slane, whose daughter was married to Ormonde’s natural son Piers, and in the latter’s company he went into Munster after a few days’ rest. The Archbishop, who was soon hunted down, with Ormonde’s help, made no secret of having been engaged in the work of the Inquisition, and charged Kildare and Delvin with the late insurrection – thus showing that Barnewall had spoken truly. Walsingham recommended the use of ‘torture, or any other severe manner of proceeding, to gain his knowledge of all foreign practices against Her Majesty’s states.’ The Lords Justices objected that they had no rack nor other such instrument of terror, and that the Tower of London would be a fitter place for the experiment. Walsingham then advised them to toast the prisoner’s feet at the fire with hot boots. A commission was accordingly made out to Fenton and Waterhouse, and the ordeal was applied with frightful severity. The letters brought by O’Hurley had been intercepted, and could not therefore be denied, but nothing of importance was elicited. A letter which he had written to Ormonde was produced, and the Lords Justices took care to hint at the Earl’s complicity, but without effect. The lawyers held that an indictment for treasons committed abroad would not lie, and in any case a trial by jury was not to be risked. The Lords Justices suggested martial law, to which, as they grimly observed, the landless Archbishop could not fairly object. Seeing that further torture would be useless Walsingham agreed to this course, and noted the Queen’s ‘good acceptation of their careful travail in this matter.’ Throughout the correspondence it is evident that Elizabeth and all her servants looked upon O’Hurley mainly as a traitor and not as a recusant; and that
St. Leger to Burghley, Aug. 5 and Oct. 19, 1583; N. White to Burghley, Aug. 24; Ormonde to Burghley, Sept. 4 and 23 (the latter enclosing Lord Roche’s letter); Privy Council to Ormonde, Sept. 19.
I have followed the strictly contemporary account printed by Archdeacon Rowan in the
The spot where Desmond fell is on the right bank, rather low down in the glen. No doubt the cabin where he spent the night was higher up. In the survey made by Sir Valentine Browne and others, and privately printed by Mr. S. M. Hussey, is the following passage: ‘A great wood here and there, filled with oak-trees fit for house timber, but not large enough for the making of ships and castles. But the greater part of the said wood consists in underwood of the age of fifty and sixty years, filled with dotted trees – ash, hazels, sallows, willows, alders, birches, white-thorns and such like… The wood is called Glanageenty, in which the late Earl of Desmond was slain in his rebellion, containing in length about four miles, and in breadth two miles, which said woods, because no woods there are saleable, and they lie under the mountains of Slew-Logher, far from any river or navigable stream, are here valued at
Birch’s
Second examination of Christopher Barnewall, Aug. 12, 1583.
