No master hand has as yet made this special portion of Irish history his own.  When he does so—­if the keen edge of his perceptions, that is to say, has not been dimmed by too strong an earlier prepossession—­we shall perhaps learn that the admitted failure of Essex, so disastrous to himself, was more honourable than the admitted and the well-rewarded success of Mountjoy.  The situation, as every English leader soon found, was one that admitted of no possible fellowship between two alternatives, success and pity; between the commonest and most elementary dictates of humanity, and the approval of the queen and her Council.  There was but one method by which a success could be assured, and this was the method which Mountjoy now pushed relentlessly, and from which Essex’s more sensitively attuned nature evidently shrank.  The enemies it was necessary to annihilate were not so much Tyrone’s soldiers, as the poor, the feeble, the helpless, the old, the women, and the little children.  Famine—­oddly called by Edward III. the “gentlest of war’s hand-maids”—­was here the only certain, perhaps the only possible agent.  By it, and by it alone, the germs of insurrection could be stamped out and blighted as it were at their very birth.

There was no further shrinking either from its application.  Mountjoy established military stations at different points in the north, and proceeded to demolish everything that lay between them.  With a deliberation which left little to be desired he made his soldiers destroy every living speck of green that was to be seen, burn every roof, and slaughter every beast which could not be conveniently driven into camp.  With the aid of Sir George Carew, who enthusiastically endorsed his policy, and has left us a minute account of their proceedings, they swept the country before them.  The English columns moved steadily from point to point, establishing themselves wherever they went, in strongly fortified outposts, from which points flying detachments were sent to ravage all the intermediate districts.  The ground was burnt to the very sod; all harvest utterly cleared away; starvation in its most grisly forms again began to stalk the land; the people perished by tens of thousands, and the tales told by eye-witnesses of what they themselves had seen at this time are too sickening to be allowed needlessly to blacken these pages.

As a policy nothing, however, could be more brilliantly successful.  At the arrival of Mountjoy the English power in Ireland was at about the lowest ebb it ever reached under the Tudors.  Ormond, the Lieutenant-General of the kingdom, had recently been taken captive by the O’Mores in Leinster, by whom he was held for an enormous ransom.  Success, with all its glittering train, seemed to have gone bodily over to Tyrone.  There was hardly a town in the whole island that remained in the hands of the Deputy.  Before Mountjoy left all this was simply reversed.  Not only had the royal power regained everything that had been snatched from it, but from sea to sea it stood upon a far firmer and stronger basis than it had ever done before.