to the few who might profit by it; yet after the repeated acts of treachery which had been at least meditated towards Shan with Elizabeth's knowledge, she was scarcely justified in assuming a tone of such innocent anger; nor was the result of the investigation more satisfactory. After many contradictions and denials Smith at last confessed his guilt, took the entire responsibility on himself, and declared that his object was to rid his country of a dangerous enemy. The English law in the sixteenth century against crimes of violence has not been suspected of too much leniency; yet it was discovered by some strange interpretation that as the crime had not been completed it was not punishable by death. Notwithstanding Elizabeth's letter there was an evident desire to hush up the inquiry; and strangest of all, Sir Thomas Cusak induced O'Neil to drop his complaint. 'I persuaded O'Neil to forget the matter,' Cusak 1564. wrote to Cecil, 'whereby no more talk should grow of it; seeing there is no law to punish the offender other than by discretion in imprisonment, which O'Neil would little regard except the party might be executed by death, and that the law doth not suffer. So as the matter being wisely pacified it were well done to leave it.'1

Behind the fragments of information preserved in the State correspondence, much may remain concealed, which if found might explain a conclusion so unexpected. Had Smith been the only offender it might have been

1 Sir Thomas Cusak to Cecil, March 22, 1564: Irish MSS.

expected that he would have been gladly sacrificed as an evidence of Elizabeth's evenhandedness, and Shan per haps did not care for the punishment of a subordinate if he could not reach the principal.

He used the occasion however to grasp once more at the great object of his ambition, and to obtain with it if possible a refined revenge on Sussex. Seeing Elizabeth anxious, whether honestly or from motives of policy, to atone for the attempt to murder him, he renewed his suit to her for an English wife. The M'Ilams, relations of the Countess of Argyle, had offered him a thousand pounds to let her go; and Elizabeth half promising if the Countess were restored to her friends to consider his prayer, he fixed on Sussex's sister, who had been employed as the bait to catch him; so to humble the haughty English Earl into the very dust and dirt.

Elizabeth's desire to conciliate however stopped short of ignominy. Lord Sussex deserved no better, nor his sister if she had been a party to her brother's plot; but Cecil did not even venture to move the matter to the Queen, fearing how she might take it;' and Shan, laying by his resentment, contented himself with the substantial results of his many successes. M'Guyre had to fly from his islands; O'Donnell's castles were surrendered; the Armagh garrison was withdrawn at last. Over lake and river, bog and mountain, Shan was undisputed Lord of Ulster-save only on the Antrim shore where the Scots maintained a precarious independence. So absolute was he that with contemptuous pity he opened the doors of the Callogh's prison. The aged and

broken chief came to sue for maintenance at the Court to which his fidelity had ruined him; and Cusak consoled Cecil with saying that he was but a poor creature without activity or manhood,' and that 'O'Neil, continuing in his truth, was more worthy to be embraced than three O'Donnells.'1

2

Here then for the present the story will leave Shan, safely planted on the first step of his ambition, in all but the title sole monarch of the north. He built himself a fort on an island in Lough Neagh, which he called Foogh-ni-Gall'or 'Hate of Englishmen ;' and grew rich on the spoils of his enemies, 'the only strong man in Ireland.' He administered justice after a paternal fashion, permitting no robbers but himself; when wrong was done he compelled restitution, or at his own cost redeemed the harm to the loser's contentation.' Two hundred pipes of wine were stored in his cellars; six hundred men-at-arms fed at his table-' as it were his janissaries;' and daily he feasted the beggars at his gate, saying it was meet to serve Christ first.' Half wolf, half fox, he lay couched in his Castle of Malepartus,' with his emissaries at Rome, at Paris, and at Edinburgh. In the morning he was the subtle and dexterous pretender to the Irish throne; in the afternoon, 'when the wine was in him,' he was a dissolute savage revelling in sensuality, with his unhappy countess uncoupled from her horse-boy to wait upon his pleasure.

1 Cusak to Cecil, 1564: Irish MSS.

2 CAMPION.

He broke loose from time to time to keep his hand in practice: at Carlingford, for instance, he swept off one day some two hundred sheep and oxen, while his men violated sixty women in the town.' But Elizabeth looked away and endeavoured not to see; the English Government had resolved to stir no sleeping dogs in Ireland till a staff was provided to chastise them if they would bite.' Terence Daniel, the Dean of those rough-riding canons of Armagh, was installed as Primate; the Earl of Sussex was recalled to England; and the new Archbishop, unable to contain his exultation at the blessed day which had dawned upon his country, wrote to Cecil to say how the millennium had come at last-glory be to God!

Meantime Cecil set himself to work at the root of the evil. Relinquishing for the present the hope of extending the English rule in Ireland, he endeavoured to probe the secret of its weakness and to restore some kind of order and justice in the counties where that rule survived. On the return of Sussex to England Sir Thomas Wroth and Sir Nicholas Arnold were sent over as commissioners to inquire into the complaints against the army. The scandals which they brought to light, the recrimination, rage, and bitterness which they provoked, fill a large volume of the State Papers.

Peculation had grown into a custom; the most barefaced frauds had been converted by habit into rights; and 'a captain's' commission was thought 'ill-handled '

1 Fitzwilliam to Cecil, June 17, 1565: Irish MSS.

VOL. VII.

2 Cecil to Sir Nicholas Arnold: Irish MSS.

11

if it did not yield beyond the pay 500l. a year. The companies appeared in the pay books as having their full complement of a hundred men. The actual number rarely exceeded sixty. The soldiers followed the example of their leaders, and robbed and ground the peasantry. Each and all had commenced their evil ways, when the Government itself was the first and worst offender.

A few more years-perhaps months-of such doings would have made an end of English dominion. Sir Thomas Wroth described the Pale on his arrival as a weltering sea of confusion- the captains out of credit,' 'the soldiers' mutinous, the English Government hated; ' every man seeking his own, and none that which was Christ's;' 'few in all the land reserved from bowing the knee to Baal;' 'the laws for religion mere words.'1

Something too much of theological anxiety impaired Wroth's usefulness. He wished to begin at the outside with reforming the creed. The thing needful was to reform the heart and to bring back truth and honesty. Wroth therefore was found unequal to the work; and the purification of the Pale was left to Arnold-a hard, iron, pitiless man, careful of things and careless of phrases, untroubled with delicacy, and impervious to Irish enchantments.' The account books were dragged to light; where iniquity in high places was registered in inexorable figures. The hands of Sir Henry Ratcliffe, the brother of Sussex, were not found clean, Arnold

'Sir Thomas Wroth to Cecil, April 16: Irish MSS.