came to be called, had become Protestants at the royal order.  Ruin perched upon Ireland’s hills and made a wilderness of her fertile valleys.  The Irish chieftains with their faithful followers moved from place to place in woods and hollows of the hills.  English colonists were settled on confiscated lands, and were harried by those who had been driven from their homes.  It was war among graves.  At last O’Neill made composition with the government when all was lost in the field, but the passionate Irish resolve never to submit still stalked like a ghost, as if it could not perish.

When Elizabeth died it was thought that better things were coming to Ireland with James I., the son of Mary, Queen of Scots.  Nothing of the kind.  That curiously minded creature at once made an ingenuous proclamation: 

“Whereas his Majesty was informed that his subjects of Ireland had been deceived by a false report that his Majesty was disposed to allow them liberty of conscience and the free choice of religion, now, etc.”  Fresh “transplanting” of English and Scotch settlers on the lands of the Irish was the gist of his answer to the “false reports.”  So again the war of surprise, ambush, raid, and foray went on in a hundred places at once, but the result was that the English power was even more firmly seated than before.

In the time of Charles I. there were terrible slaughters both of Protestants and Catholics.  Patriotism and loyalty as moving causes had disappeared, but religion fiercely took their place.  With Cromwell, the religious persecution took on an apocalyptic note of massacre, but the Irish were still showing that they were there with arms in their hands.  The names of Owen Roe O’Neill and his splendid victory, in 1646, at Benburb over the English and Scotch, where he slew more than 3,000 men, and of another Hugh O’Neill, who made such a brilliant defense at Clonmel against Cromwell, shine brightly out of the darkness.  But Ireland, parcelled out among the victors, was always the weaker after every campaign.  Waves of war swept over her.  She became mixed up in the rivalries of the English royal families, religion playing the most important part in the differences.  It had armed Henry and Elizabeth, James and Charles against her.  It gave edge to Cromwell’s sword, and it led her into a great effort on behalf of James II.  When William of Orange crossed the Boyne, all that followed for a century was symbolized.  Athlone, Aughrim, Limerick, all places of great and fierce contests, were decided against her.  French support of a kind had James, but not enough.  Bravery and enthusiasm may win battles, but they do not carry through great campaigns.  Once again God marched with the heaviest, best-fed, best-armed battalions.  The great Tyrone dying in exile at Rome, Red Hugh O’Donnell perishing in Spain in the early days of the seventeenth century, were to prefigure the fighting and dying of half a million Irish warriors on continental soil for a hundred years after the fall of Limerick as the seventeenth century neared its close.