He was not given the chance.  Hunted over the Slemish mountains, with the price of L1,000 on his head, one by one the trusty companions who had clung to him so faithfully were taken and killed.  His own course could inevitably be but a short one.  News reached the English captain at Castlemain one night that the prey was not far off.  A dozen English soldiers stole up the stream in the grey of the morning.  The cabin where the Desmond lay was surrounded, the door broken in, and the earl stabbed before there was time for him to spring from his bed.  The tragedy had now been played out to the bitterest end.  As formerly with the Leinster Geraldines, so now with the Munster ones, of the direct heirs of the house only a single child was left, a feeble boy, afterwards known by the significant title of the “Tower Earl,” with the extinguishing of whose sickly tenure of life the very name of Desmond ceases to appear upon the page of Irish history.

XXVII.

BETWEEN TWO MORE STORMS.

Two great risings against Elizabeth’s power in Ireland had thus been met and suppressed.  A third and a still more formidable one was yet to come.  The interval was filled with renewed efforts at colonization upon a yet larger scale than before.  Munster, which at the beginning of the Desmond rising had been accounted the most fertile province in Ireland, was now little better than a desert.  Not once or twice, but many times the harvest had been burnt and destroyed, and great as had been the slaughter, numerous as were the executions, they had been far eclipsed by the multitude of those who had died of sheer famine.

Spenser’s evidence upon this point has been often quoted, but no other words will bring the picture before us in the same simple, awful vividness; nor must it be forgotten that the man who tells it was under no temptation to exaggerate having himself been a sharer in the deeds which had produced so sickening a calamity.

“They were brought to such wretchedness,” he says, “that any stony heart would rue the same.  Out of every corner of the woods and glens, they came, creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them.  They looked like anatomies of death; they spoke like ghosts crying out of their graves.  They did eat the dead carrions, where they did find them, yea and one another soon after, in as much as the very carcases they spared not to scrape out of their graves; and if they found a plot of watercresses or shamrocks, there they thronged as to a feast.”

To replace this older population, thus starved, slaughtered, made away with by sword and pestilence with new colonists was the scheme of the hour.  Desmond’s vast estate, covering nearly six hundred thousand Irish acres, not counting waste land, had all been declared forfeit to the Crown.  This and a considerable portion of territory also forfeit in Leinster was now offered to English colonists upon the most advantageous terms.  No rent was to be paid at first, and for ten years the undertakers were to be allowed to send their exports duty free.