So heroic a measure was not to be put in force at once.  As far as Carew’s claims went, he took the matter, however, into his own hands by forcibly expelling the occupiers of the lands in question, and putting his own retainers into them.  As fortune would have it, amongst the first lands thus laid hold of were some belonging to the Butlers, brothers of Lord Ormond, and therefore probably the only Irish landowners whose cry for justice was pretty certain just then to be heard in high quarters.  Horrible tales of the atrocities committed by Carew and his band was reported by Sir Edward Butler, who upon his side was not slow to commit retaliations of the same sort A spasm of anger, and a wild dread of coming contingencies flew through the whole South of Ireland.  Sir James Fitzmaurice, cousin of the Earl of Desmond, broke into open rebellion; so did also both the younger Butlers.  Ormond himself, who was in England, was as angry as the fiercest, and informed Cecil in plain terms that “if the lands of good subjects were not to be safe, he for one would be a good subject no longer.”

It was no part of the policy of the Government to alienate the one man in Ireland upon whose loyalty they could depend at a pinch.  By the personal efforts of the queen his wrath was at last pacified, and he agreed to accept her earnest assurance that towards him at least no injury was intended.  This done, he induced his brothers to withdraw from the alliance, while Sir Henry Sidney, sword in hand, went into Munster and carried out the work of pacification in the usual fashion, burning villages, destroying the harvest, driving off cattle, blowing up castles, and hanging their garrisons in strings over the battlements.  After which he marched to Connaught, leaving Sir Humphrey Gilbert behind him to keep order in the south.

For more than two years Sir James Fitzmaurice continued to hold out in his rocky fastness amongst the Galtese mountains.  A sort of grim humour pervades the relations between him and Sir John Perrot, the new President of Munster.  Perrot had boasted upon his arrival that he would soon “hunt that fox out of his hole.”  The fox, however, showed a disposition to take the part of the lion, sallying out unexpectedly, ravaging the entire district, burning Kilmallock, and returning again to his mountains before he could be interfered with.  The following year he marched into Ulster, and on his way home burnt Athlone, the English garrison there looking helplessly on; joined the two Mac-an-Earlas as they were called, the sons of Lord Clanricarde, and assisted them to lay waste Galway, and so returned triumphantly across the Shannon to Tipperary.  Once Perrot all but made an end of him, but his soldiers took that convenient opportunity of mutinying, and so baulked their leader of his prey.  Another time, in despair of bringing the matter to any conclusion, the president proposed that it should be decided by single combat between them, a proposal which Fitzmaurice prudently resisted on the ground that though Perrot’s place could no doubt readily be supplied, his own was less easily to fill, and that therefore for his followers’ sake he must decline.