The English admiral, Winter, with his fleet had long been delayed by bad weather.  When at length it arrived, cannon were landed and laid in position upon the sand hills.  Next day the siege commenced.  There was heavy firing on both sides, but the fort was soon found to be untenable.  The garrison thereupon offered to capitulate, and an unconditional surrender was demanded.  There being no alternative, these terms were accepted.  Lord Grey thereupon “put in certain bands,” under the command of Captain Raleigh.  “The Spaniard,” says Spenser, who was an eye-witness of the whole scene, “did absolutely yield himself, and the fort, and all therein, and only asked mercy,” This, “it was not thought good,” he adds, “to show them.”  They were accordingly all slaughtered in cold blood, a few women and priests who were with them hanged, the officers being reserved for ransom.  “There was no other way,” Spenser observes in conclusion, “but to make that end of them as thus was done[8].”

[8] “View of the State of Ireland,” pp. 5, 11.

This piece of work satisfactorily finished, Grey returned rapidly to Dublin to crush the Leinster insurgents.  Kildare and Delvin, though they had kept themselves clear of the rebellion, were arrested and thrown into prison.  Small bands of troopers were sent into the Wicklow mountains to hunt out the insurgents.  Baltinglass escaped to the Continent, but the two Eustaces his brothers, with Garrot O’Toole and Feagh McHugh were caught, killed, and their heads sent to Dublin.  Clanricarde’s two sons, the Mac-an-Earlas, were out in the Connemara mountains and could not be got at; but Malby again overran their country, burning houses and slaughtering without mercy.  In Dublin, the Anglo-Irishmen of the Pale were being brought to trial for treason, and hung or beheaded in batches.  Kildare was sent to England to die in the Tower.  With the exception of the North, which on this occasion had kept quiet, the whole country had become one great reeking shambles; what sword and rope and torch had spared, famine came in to complete.

The Earl of Desmond was now a houseless fugitive, hunted like a wolf or mad dog through the valleys and over the mountains of his own ancestral “kingdom.”  His brothers had already fallen.  Sir John Fitzgerald had been killed near Cork, and his body hung head downwards, by Raleigh’s order, upon the bridge of the river Lee.  The other brother, Sir James, had met with a similar fate.  Saunders, the legate, had died of cold and exposure.  Desmond alone escaped, time after time, and month after month.  Hunted, desperate, in want of the bare necessities of life, he was still in his own eyes the Desmond, ancestral owner of nearly a hundred miles of territory.  Never in his most successful period a man of any particular strength of character, sheer pride seems to have upheld him now.  He scorned to make terms with his hated enemy, Ormond.  If he yielded to any one, he sent word, it would be only to the queen herself in person.