For the next two years we see Owen Roe O’Neill holding the great central plain, the west and most of the north of Ireland against the armies of the English Parliamentarians and Royalists alike, and gaining victory after victory, generally against superior numbers, better armed and better equipped.  We find him time after time almost betrayed by the Supreme Council, in which the Norman lords of Leinster, perpetually anxious for their own feudal estates, were ready to treat with whichever of the English parties was for the moment victorious, hoping that, whatever might be the outcome of the great English struggle, they themselves might be gainers.  At this time they were in possession of many of the abbey lands, and there was perpetual friction between them and the ecclesiastics, their co-religionists, who had been driven from these same lands, so that the Norman landowners were the element of fatal weakness throughout this whole movement, willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike.  While praying for the final defeat of the English parliamentary forces, they dreaded to see this defeat brought about by Owen Roe O’Neill, in whom they saw the representative of the old tribal ownership of Gaelic times, a return to which would mean their own extinction.

Matters went so far that the Supreme Council, representing chiefly these Norman lords, had practically betrayed its trust to the Royalist party in England, and would have completed that betrayal had not the beheading of King Charles signalized the triumph of the Parliamentarians.  Even then the Norman lords hoped for the Restoration, and strove in every way to undermine the authority of their own general, Owen Roe O’Neill, who was almost forced to enter into an alliance with the Puritans by the treachery of the Norman lords.  It is of the greatest interest to find Monroe writing thus to Owen Roe in August, 1649:  “By my own extraction, I have an interest in the Irish nation.  I know how your lands have been taken, and your people made hewers of wood and drawers of water.  If an Irishman can be a scourge to his own nation, the English will give him fair words but keep him from all trust, that they may destroy him when they have served themselves by him.”

On November 6, 1649, this great general died after a brief illness, having for seven years led his armies to constant victory, while the Norman lords, who were in name his allies, were secretly plotting against him for their own profit.  Yet so strong and dominant was his genius that he overcame not only the forces of his foes but the treacheries of his friends, and his last days saw him at one with the Normans, while the forces of the Parliamentarians in Ireland were calling on him for help.