correspondence would be more safe.  Here is a specimen of his English:  ’I know well that within these four days the sayed Shan will come to dystroy me contrey except your Lordshypp will sette some remedy in the matter.’  He did indeed go down into Fermanagh with ‘a great hoste.’  As Maguire refused to submit, Shane ’bygan to wax mad, and to cawsse his men to bran all his corn and howsses.’  He spared neither church nor sanctuary; three hundred women and children were piteously murdered, and Maguire himself, clean banished, as he described it, took refuge with the remnant of his people in the islands on the lake, whither Shane was making boats to pursue him.  ‘Help me, your lordship,’ the hunted wretch cried, in his despair, to Sussex.  ’Ye are lyke to make hym the strongest man of all Erlond, for every man wyll take an exampull by the gratte lostys; take hyd to yourself by thymes, for he is lyke to have all the power from this place thill he come to the wallys of Gallway to rysse against you.’[1]

[Footnote 1:  Wright’s Elizabeth, vol. i. p.73.]

It is the boast of the Irish that when Shane had subdued all his opponents, he ruled Tyrone for some time with such order, ’that if a robbery was committed within his territory, he either caused the property to be restored, or reimbursed the loser out of his own treasury.’[1]

[Footnote 1:  Haverty’s History of Ireland, p.300.]

The perplexity of the Government in this critical emergency is vividly described by Mr. Froude:  ’Elizabeth knew not which way to turn.  Force, treachery, conciliation had been tried successively, and the Irish problem was more hopeless than ever.  In the dense darkness of the prospects of Ulster there was a solitary gleam of light.  Grown insolent with prosperity, Shane had been dealing too peremptorily with the Scots; his countess, though compelled to live with him, and to be the mother of his children, had felt his brutality and repented of her folly, and perhaps attempted to escape.  In the daytime, when he was abroad marauding, she was coupled like a hound to a page or a horse-boy, and only released at night when he returned to his evening orgies.  The fierce Campbells were not men to bear tamely these outrages from a drunken savage on the sister of their chief, and Sussex conceived that if the Scots, by any contrivance, were separated from Shane, they might be used as a whip to scourge him.’

At length Sussex, determined to crush the arch-rebel, marched northward in April, 1563, with a mixed force of English and Irish, ill-armed, ill-supplied, dispirited and almost disloyal.  The diary of the commander-in-chief is, perhaps, the funniest on record:  ’April 6:  The army arrived at Armagh.  April 8:  The army marches back to Newry to bring up stores and ammunition left behind.  April 11:  The army advances again to Armagh, where it waits for galloglasse and kerne from the Pale.  April 14:  The commander-in-chief answers a letter from James