offered, Desmond retaliated by sacking and burning Youghal.  For two days the Geraldines revelled in plunder; they violated the women and murdered all who could not escape.  At length Elizabeth was roused to the greatness of the danger, her parsimony was overcome.  A larger force was drawn into Ireland than had ever been assembled there for a century.  Ormond, the hereditary enemy of Desmond, was appointed commander-in-chief; and Burghley, writing to him in the name of the queen, concluded thus:  ’So now I will merely say, Butler aboo, against all that cry in the new language—­Papa aboo, and God send your hearts’ desire to banish and vanquish those cankered Desmonds!’ The war now raged, and, as usual, the innocent people, the cultivators of the soil, were the first victims.  ’We passed through the rebel countries,’ wrote Pelham, ’in two companies, burning with fire all habitations, and executing the people wherever we found them.’  Mr. Froude says:  ’Alone of all the English commanders he expressed remorse at the work.’  Well, if the creatures they destroyed were horses, dogs, or cats, we should expect a man of ordinary human feelings to be shocked at the wholesale butchery.  But the beings slaughtered were men and women and children—­Christians found unarmed and defenceless in their dwellings.  Let the English imagine such a war carried on in Kent or Yorkshire, by Irish invaders, killing in the name of the Pope.  The Irish Annalists say that Pelham and Ormond killed the blind and the aged, women and children, sick and idiots, sparing none.

The English, as usual, had help from an Irish chief in the work of destruction.  Ormond had in his train M’Carthymore, ’who, believing Desmond’s day to be done, hoped, by making himself useful, to secure a share of the plunder.’  Dividing their forces, Pelham marched on to Dingle, ’destroying as he went, with Ormond parallel to him on the opposite side of the bay, the two parties watching each other’s course at night across the water by the flames of the burning cottages!’

The fleet was waiting at Dingle.  There was a merry meeting of the officers.  ‘Here,’ says Sir Nicholas White, ’my lord justice and I gathered cockles for our supper.’[1] The several hunting parties compared notes in the evening.  Sometimes the sport was bad.  On one occasion Pelham reported that his party had hanged a priest in the Spanish dress.  ‘Otherwise,’ he says, ’we took small prey, and killed less people, though we reached many places in our travel!’ At Killarney they found the lakes full of salmon.  In one of the islands there was an abbey, in another a parish church, in another a castle, ’out of which there came to them a fair lady, the rejected wife of Lord Fitzmaurice.’  Even the soldiers were struck with the singular loveliness of the scene.  ‘A fairer land,’ one of them said, ’the sun did never shine upon—­pity to see it lying waste in the hands of traitors.’  Mr. Froude, who deals more justly by the Irish in his last volumes, replies:  ’Yet it was by those traitors that the woods whose beauty they so admired had been planted and fostered.  Irish hands, unaided by English art or English wealth, had built Muckross and Innisfallen and Aghadoe, and had raised the castles on whose walls the modern poet watched the splendour of the sunset.’