avowed by those who advised her, that he would fail. Most certainly the English commander had done no injustice to his incompetency. Three hundred horses were reported to have been lost, and Cecil wrote to inquire the meaning of it. Sussex admitted that the loss was true indeed.' Being Easter-time, and he having travelled the week before and Easter-day till night, thought fit to give Easter Monday to prayerand in this time certain churls stole off with the horses.1 The piety which could neglect practical duty for the outward service of devotion, yet at the same time could make overtures to Neil Grey to assassinate his master, requires no very lenient consideration. The news of the second failure reached Elizabeth at the crisis of the difficulty at Havre. She was straining every nerve to supply the waste of an army which the plague was destroying. She had a war with France hanging over her head. She was uncertain of Spain and but half secure of the allegiance of her English subjects. It was against her own judgment that the last enterprise had been adventured, and she reverted at once to her original determination to spend no more money in reforming a country which every effort for its amendment plunged into deeper anarchy. She would content herself with a titular sovereignty. She would withdraw or reorganize on a changed footing the profligate and worthless soldiers whose valour flinched from an enemy, and went no further than the plunder of a friend. The Sussex to Cecil, May 26: Irish MSS. Irish should be left to themselves to realize their own themselves their own way. ideals and govern Sir Thomas Cusak, a member of the Irish council, came over with a scheme which, if the Queen consented to it, would satisfy the people and would ensure the return of Shan O'Neil to a nominal allegiance. The four provinces should constitute each a separate presidency. Ulster, Connaught, and Munster should be governed in the Queen's name by some Irish chief or nobleman—if not elected by the people, yet chosen in compliance with their wishes. O'Neil would have the north, the O'Briens or the Clanrickards the west. The south would fall to Desmond. On these conditions Cusak would undertake for the quiet of the country and for the undisturbed occupation of the Pale by the English Government. August. Prepared as Elizabeth had almost become to abandon Ireland entirely, she welcomed this project as a reprieve. She wrote to Sussex to say that, finding his expedition had resulted only in giving fresh strength to Shan O'Neil, 'she had decided to come to an end of the war of Ulster by agreement rather than by force;' and Cusak returned the first week in August empowered to make whatever concessions should be necessary, preparatory to the proposed alteration. To Shan O'Neil he was allowed to say that the Queen was surprised at his folly in levying war against her; nor could she understand his object. She was aware of his difficulties; she knew the barbarity' of the people with whom he had to deal; she had never intended to exact any strict account of him; and if he was dissatisfied with the arrangements to which he had consented when in England, he had but to prove himself a good subject, and he 'should not only have those points reformed, but also any pre-eminence in that country which her Majesty might grant without doing any other person wrong.' If he desired to have a council established at Armagh, he should himself be the president of that council; if he wished to drive the Scots out of Antrim, her own troops should assist in the expulsion; if he was offended with the garrison in the cathedral, she would gladly see peace maintained in a manner less expensive to herself. To the Primacy he might name the person most agreeable to himself; and with the Primacy, as a matter of course, even the form of maintaining the Protestant Church would be abandoned also. In return for these concessions the Queen demanded only that to save her honour Shan should sue for them as a favour instead of demanding them as a right.' The rebel chief consented without difficulty to conditions which cost him nothing; and after an interview with Cusak, O'Neil wrote a formal apology to Elizabeth, and promised for the future to be her Majesty's true and faithful subject. Indentures were drawn on the 17th of December, in which the Ulster sovereignty was transferred to him in everything but the name; and the treaty-such treaty as it was-required only Elizabeth's 1 Instructions to Sir Thomas Cusak, August 7: Irish MSS. signature, when a second dark effort was made to cut the knot of the Irish difficulty. As a first evidence of returning cordiality, a present of wine was sent to Shan from Dublin. It was consumed at his table, but the poison had been unskilfully prepared. It brought him and half his household to the edge of death, but no one actually died. Refined chemical analysis was not required to detect the cause of the illness; and Shan clamoured for redress with the fierceness of a man accustomed rather to do wrong than to suffer it. The guilt could not be fixed on Sussex. September. The crime was traced to an English resident in Dublin named Smith; and if Sussex had been the instigator, his instrument was too faithful to betray him. Yet, after the fatal letter in which the Earl had revealed to Elizabeth his own personal endeavours to procure O'Neil's murder, the suspicion cannot but cling to him that the second attempt was not made without his connivance. Nor can Elizabeth herself be wholly acquitted of responsibility. She professed the loudest indignation; but she ventured no allusion to his previous communication with her; and no hint transpires of any previous displeasure with Sussex's previous confession to herself. In its origin and in its close the story is wrapped in mystery. The treachery of an English nobleman, the conduct of the inquiry, and the anomalous termination of it, would have been incredible even in Ireland, were not the original correspondence extant in which the facts are not denied. Elizabeth, on the receipt of O'Neil's complaint, directed Sir Thomas Cusak to look into the evidence most scrupulously; she begged Shan to produce every proof which he could obtain for the detection both of the party himself and of all others that were any wise thereto consenting; to the intent none might escape that were parties thereunto of what condition soever the same should be.' October. 'We have given commandment,' she wrote to Sussex, 'to show you how much it grieveth us to think that any such horrible attempt should be used as is alleged by Shan O'Neil to have been attempted by Thomas Smith to kill him by poison; we doubt not but you have, as reason is, committed the said Smith to prison, and proceeded to the just trial thereof; for it behoveth us for all good and honourable respects to have the fault severely punished, and so we will and charge you to do.'1 'We assure you,' she wrote to Cusak, 'the indignation which we conceive of this fact, being told with some probability by you, together with certain other causes of suspicion which O'Neil hath gathered, hath wrought no small effect in us to incline us to bear with divers things unorderly passed, and to trust to that which you have on his behalf promised hereafter in time to come.'2 It is in human nature to feel deeper indignation at a crime which has been detected and exposed than at guilt equally great of which the knowledge is confined 1 The Queen to Sussex, October 15: Irish MSS. |