The English Government was now relieved from the pressing danger which was always threatening from the north, not indeed by the valour of their own army, but by the remorseless vengeance of two injured Celtic chieftains. An act of attainder was passed on O'Neil,* and the country of Tyrone was declared forfeit. The vassal chiefs of Shane became vassals of the Crown. Tirlough Luinagh† O'Neil, who by the law of Tanistry had been elected by the tribesmen upon Shane's death, was permitted to occupy the position of chief of his own tribe, and became "The O'Neil"-Elizabeth apparently thought it wiser not to force upon them the unpopular claims of the representative of the Baron of Dungannon. II Eliz., session 3, c. 1

† So called because he was fostered by O'Luinagh of Tyrone.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE PLANTATION SPIRIT ABROAD. A.D. 1569-1576.

AFTER the death of Shane there was a short interval of quiet and recovery, which was occupied by Sidney in the holding of a Parliament for the purpose of filling the empty treasury by imposing a new duty on wines.* This measure was sturdily opposed by the gentry of the Pale, a class who were daily growing in wealth and influence; and there was also a furious controversy concerning the legality of the constitution of the Parliament itself, it being alleged that, with the view of packing the Commons, members had been returned by towns which were not incorporated, and that many sheriffs and mayors had returned themselves. Indeed, so unsatisfactory did the executive find both this Parliament and that summoned in the second year of the queen, that no other was assembled for fourteen years.

Though systematically plundered by the Crown for the support of the army, and impoverished by the depreciated condition of the currency, the English Pale, which was now an extending instead of a contracting II Eliz., session 4, c. I.

*

area, was gradually growing in prosperity. There was a steady rise in the value of its produce; the land was well tilled, and full of cattle; the cities and towns were populous; the houses well built, and furnished "with plate, furniture, and apparel;" the youth were sent abroad for education to Louvain, Dôle, and Rome, and to study law at the inns of court in London. The condition of the walled towns, both those on the coast and those in the interior, which were almost exclusively inhabited by people of unmixed English blood, was a great contrast to that of the open country: a brisk traffic was carried on between the citizens and the country folk, and the seaboard cities were the emporia of an increasing trade with other countries, more especially Spain. There had been a considerable addition made to the "shireland." Anally, by the submission of O'Farrel, had been converted into the county of Longford; the county of Connaught had been subdivided into the counties of Mayo and Galway; and Roscommon had had Sligo and Leitrim carved out of it. Thomond had been denominated County Clare, and transferred from the province of Munster to that of Connaught. The territory of Desmond, however, was in a wretched condition. The hereditary quarrels between the Earls of Desmond and Ormonde had turned the country into a wilderness; and Sir Henry Sidney, in the description he gives of it, says that "he never saw a more waste and desolate land, no not in the confines of other countries where actual war hath continually been kept by the greatest princes of Christendom.”

II Eliz., session 3, c. 9.

Elizabeth's great difficulty was shortness of money. She grudged every shilling which was expended in the government of Ireland, and was constantly requiring schemes from her deputies for the making of the Irish government self-supporting. As the result of these searchings of heart it was determined that trial should be made of Sussex's plan of governing the provinces by presidents; who should keep order each in his own government by maintaining a small standing army principally composed of native contingents, and should relieve the Dublin exchequer of all military charges by quartering the troops upon the people. This was in effect reviving for the benefit of the Crown the old practice of coyne and livery, which had been condemned and prohibited over and over again when practised by the Irish nobles, and was universally acknowledged to have been the curse of the country. The first experiment was made in Connaught by the appointment of Sir Edward Fitton, a judge of the Queen's Bench in Dublin, to the office of President, with a commission to execute martial law. The immediate consequence of this supersession of the ordinary law of the land was a rising of various members of the O'Brien and Bourke families, which he vainly endeavoured to put down by a succession of acts of violence; and when he had been all but driven out of the country the Government was compelled to recall him.

But the scheme which found most favour in the eyes of the queen and in the eyes of her iron deputy, Sir

Henry Sidney, was the old one of planting the country with English settlers. England was full of men who aspired to be soldiers of fortune; the discovery of the New World had made them drunk with the spirit of adventure; they looked upon Ireland, as indeed at that time did even the majority of sober Englishmen, as a country ripe for colonization, inhabited by a race who deserved no better treatment than the wild beasts, and whose fat lands were the proper birthright of enterprising but impecunious younger sons. Cecil had a plan for drafting one able-bodied emigrant from every two parishes in England; and for meeting the expense of sending them over to Ireland and supporting them for one year in their new domicile, by a rate to be levied on the counties from which they had been taken. In 1570, Shane O'Neil's territory being held to have escheated, a grant was made to one Thomas Chaterton and his heirs of a portion of the county of Armagh, and in the same year a grant of the district of Ardes and Clanaboy, in County Down, was made to the illegitimate son of Sir Thomas Smith, the queen's secretary of state, for the founding of an English Protestant colony; but the attempt of both the one and the other was a miserable failure, and the too adventurous colonists were all massacred by a tribe of the O'Neils.

A more determined effort was made in A.D. 1573 by Walter Devereux, Earl of Essex, to whom Elizabeth made a grant of half the county of Antrim and the barony of Farney in Monaghan. She advanced a sum of £10,000 for the fitting out of the expedition