Queen Mary’s reign was one of comparative quiet in Ireland.  Her policy towards the Catholics was held to be of good augury for Ireland.  The English garrison was reduced with impunity to 500 foot and a few horse:  but another and darker day came with Elizabeth.  Her coming to the throne, together with her fanatic devotion to the Reformation and an equal hatred of the old religion and all who clung to it, ushered in for Ireland two and a half centuries of almost unbroken misfortune.  You cannot make people over.  Some may take their opinions with their interest; others prefer to die rather than surrender theirs, and glory in the sacrifice.  The proclamations of Elizabeth had no persuasion in them for the Irish.  Her proscriptions were only another English sword at Ireland’s throat.  The disdain of the Irish maddened her.  During her long reign one campaign after another was launched against them.  Always fresh soldier hordes came pouring in under able commanders and marched forth from the Pale, generally to return shattered and worn down by constant harrying, sometimes utterly defeated with great slaughter.  So of Henry Sidney’s campaign, and so of the ill-fated Essex.  Ulster, the stronghold of the O’Neills and the O’Donnells, remained unconquered down to the last years of Elizabeth’s reign, although most of the greater battles were fought there.  In Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, and “Red” Hugh O’Donnell, prince of Tyrconnell, Ireland had two really great soldiers on her side.  The bravery, generalship, prudence, and strategy of O’Neill were worthy of all praise, and Red Hugh fell little short of his great compatriot.  In battle after battle for twenty years they defeated the English with slaughter.  Ireland, if more and more devastated by campaigns and forays, became the grave of tens of thousands of English soldiers and scores of high reputations.  Writing from Cork, the Earl of Essex, after a disastrous march through Leinster and Munster, says: 

“I am confined in Cork ... but still I have been unsuccessful; my undertakings have been attended with misfortune....  The Irish are stronger and handle their arms with more skill than our people; they differ from us also in point of discipline.  They likewise avoid pitched battles where order must be observed, and prefer skirmishes and petty warfare ... and are obstinately opposed to the English government.”

They did not like attacking or defending fortified places, he also believed.  It was only his experience.  The campaigns of Shane O’Neill, a bold but ill-balanced warrior, were full of such attacks, but one potent cause for Irish reluctance to make sieges a strong point of their strategy was that the strongest fortresses were on the sea.  An inexhaustible, powerful enemy who held the sea was not in the end to be denied on sea or land, but the Irish in stubborn despair or supreme indifference to fate fought on.  Religious rancor was added to racial hate.  Most of the English settlers, or “garrison,” as they