He was back again before long, this time with intent to seize the town.  There was little or no defence.  Ormond was away; the walls were decayed; ordnance was short—­a good deal of it, the Geraldine enemies said, had been already removed to Maynooth.  White, the commander, threw himself into the castle; the gates were opened; Lord Thomas cantered in and took possession of the town, the garrison remaining placidly looking on.

Worse was to come.  Allen, the archbishop, and the great enemy of the Fitzgeralds made an attempt to escape to England, but was caught and savagely murdered by some of the Geraldine adherents upon the sea coast near Clontarf.  When the news of these proceedings—­especially of the last named—­reached England, the sensation naturally was immense.  Henry hastily despatched Sir William Skeffington with a considerable force to restore order, but his coming was long delayed, and when he did arrive his operations were feeble in the extreme.  Ormond had marched rapidly up from the south, and almost single-handed defended the interests of government.  Even after his arrival Skeffington, who was old, cautious, and enfeebled by bad health, remained for months shut up in Dublin doing nothing, the followers of Lord Thomas wasting the country at pleasure, and burning the towns of Trim and Dunboyne, not many miles from its walls.

The Earl of Kildare had meanwhile died in prison, broken-hearted at the news of this ill-starred rising, in which he doubtless foresaw the ruin of his house.  It was not until the month of March, eight months after his arrival in Ireland, that Sir William ventured to leave Dublin, and advance to the attack of Maynooth Castle, the great Leinster stronghold and Paladium of the Geraldines.  Young Kildare, as he now was, was away in the south, but managed to throw some additional men into the castle, which was already strongly fortified, and believed in Ireland to be impregnable.  The siege train imported by the deputy shortly dispelled that illusion.  Whether, as is asserted, treachery from within aided the result or not, the end was not long delayed.  After a few days Skeffington’s cannons made a formidable breach in the walls.  The English soldiery rushed in.  The defenders threw down their arms and begged mercy, and a long row of them, including the Dean of Kildare and another priest who happened to be in the castle at the time were speedily hanging in front of its walls.  “The Pardon of Maynooth” was from that day forth a well-known Irish equivalent for the gallows!

This was the end of the rebellion.  The destruction of Maynooth Castle seems to have struck a cold chill to the very hearts of the Geraldines.  For a while, Earl Thomas and his brother-in-law, the chief of the O’Connors, tried vainly to sustain the spirits of their followers.  The rising seems to have melted away almost of its own accord, and within a few months the young leader himself surrendered to Lord Leonard Grey, the English commander, upon the