Several eminent figures appear amongst the “ruck of empty names” which fill up the list of fifteenth-century Irish viceroys.  Most of these were mere birds of passage, who made a few experiments at government—­conciliatory or the reverse, as the case might be—­and so departed again.  Sir John Talbot, the scourge of France, and antagonist of the Maid of Orleans, was one of these.  From all accounts he seems to have quite kept up his character in Ireland.  The native writers speak of him as a second Herod.  The colonist detested him for his exactions, while his soldiery were a scourge to every district they were quartered upon.  He rebuilt the bridge of Athy, however, and fortified it so as to defend that portion of the Pale, and succeeded in keeping the O’Moores, O’Byrnes, and the rest of the native marauders to some degree at bay.

In 1449, Richard, Duke of York, was sent to Ireland upon a sort of honorary exile.  He took the opposite tack of conciliation.  Although Ormond was a prominent member of the Lancastrian party, he at once made gracious overtures to him.  Desmond, too, he won over by his courtesy, and upon the birth of his son George—­afterwards the luckless Duke of Clarence—­the rival earls acted as joint sponsors, and when, in 1451, he left Ireland, he appointed Ormond his deputy and representative.

Nine years later he came back, this time as a fugitive.  The popularity which he had already won stood him then in good stead.  Seizing upon the government, he held it in the teeth of the king and Parliament for more than a year.  The news of the battle of Northampton tempted him to England.  His son, the Earl of March, had been victorious, and Henry VI, was a prisoner.  He was not destined, however, to profit by the success of his own side.  In a temporary Lancastrian triumph he was outnumbered, and killed by the troops of Queen Margaret at Wakefield.

His Irish popularity descended to his son.  A considerable number of Irish Yorkist partisans, led by the Earl of Kildare, fought beside the latter at the decisive and sanguinary battle of Towton, at which battle the rival Earl of Ormond, leader of the Irish Lancastrians, was taken prisoner, beheaded by the victors, and all his property attained, a blow from which the Butlers were long in recovering.

No other great Irish house suffered seriously.  In England the older baronage were all but utterly swept away by the Wars of the Roses, only a few here and there surviving its carnage.  In Ireland it was not so.  A certain number of Anglo-Norman names disappear at this point from its annals, but the greater number of those with which the reader has become familiar continue to be found in their now long established homes.  The Desmonds and De Burghs still reigned undisputed and unchallenged over their several remote lordships.  Ulster, indeed, had long since become wholly Irish, but within the Pale the minor barons of Norman descent—­Fingals, Gormanstons, Dunsanys, Trimbelstons and others—­remained