Acting on this advice, O’Neill took his prisoner, ’the countess, his secretary, and fifty men to the camp of Allaster M’Connell, in the far extremity of Antrim.  He was received with dissembled gratulatory words.’  For two days all went on well, and an alliance was talked of.  But the vengeance of his hosts was with difficulty suppressed.  The great chief who was now in their power, had slain their leaders in the field, had divorced James M’Connell’s daughter, had kept a high-born Scottish lady as his mistress, and had asked Argyle to give him for a wife M’Connell’s widow, who, to escape the dishonour, had remained in concealment at Edinburgh.  On the third evening, Monday June 2, when the wine and the whiskey had gone freely round, and the blood in Shane’s veins had warmed, Gilespie M’Connell, who had watched him from the first with an ill-boding eye, turned round upon M’Kevin, and asked scornfully, ’whether it was he who had bruited abroad that the lady his aunt did offer to come from Scotland to Ireland to marry with his master?’

M’Kevin meeting scorn with scorn said, that if his aunt was Queen of Scotland she might be proud to match with the O’Neill.  ‘It is false,’ the fierce Scot shouted; ’my aunt is too honest a woman to match with her husband’s murderer.’

’Shane, who was perhaps drunk, heard the words, and forgetting where he was, flung back the lie in Gilespie’s throat.  Gilespie sprung to his feet, ran out of the tent, and raised the slogan of the Isles.  A hundred dirks flashed into the moonlight, and the Irish, wherever they could be found, were struck down and stabbed.  Some two or three found their horses and escaped, all the rest were murdered; and Shane himself, gashed with fifty wounds, was wrapped in a kern’s old shirt, and flung into a pit, dug hastily among the ruined arches of Glenarm.  Even there, what was left of him was not allowed to rest.  Four days later, Piers, the captain of Knockfergus, hacked the head from the body, and carried it on a spear’s point through Drogheda to Dublin, where, staked upon a pike, it bleached on the battlements of the castle, a symbol to the Irish world of the fate of Celtic heroes.’[1]

[Footnote 1:  Froude, p.418, &c.]

Mr. Froude might have added:  Celtic heroes struck down by Celtic hands.  No lord deputy could boast of a victory over Shane O’Neill in the field.  Irish traitors in English pay, Irish clans moved by vengeance, did the work of England in the destruction of the great principality of the O’Neills, and it was by their swords, not by English valour, that Sidney ’recovered Ireland for the crown of Elizabeth.’  Whatever may have been the faults of Shane O’Neill, and no doubt they were very great, though not to be judged of by the morality of the nineteenth century, his talents, his force of character, his courage and capacity as a general, deserved more favourable notice from Mr. Froude, who, in almost every sentence of his graphic and splendid descriptions, betrays an animosity to the Celtic race, very strange in an author so enlightened, and evincing, with this exception, such generous sympathies.  After so often reviling the great Irish champion by comparing him to all sorts of wild beasts, the historian thus concludes:—­