SIR WALTER RALEGH IN IRELAND.

A FEW years ago a desultory correspondent wrote to a friend :

I have returned from the tropical seas where Ralegh's fleet suffered from tornados and fever, and I am resting for a few weeks in 'Sir Walter's study'-in the same room where he looked at the charts of Verazzano before his voyage, and where he first smoked tobacco in Europe on his return. The room is much the same as it might have been in those times. The original painting of the first governor of Virginia is there, and a contemporary engraving of Elizabeth Queen of Virginia. The long table at which he wrote, the oak chest in which he kept papers, the little Italian cabinet, the dark wainscoting with fine carvings rising up from each side of the hearthstone to the ceiling, the old deeds and parchments, some with Ralegh's seal, the original warrant, under the autograph and signet of Queen Elizabeth, granting a pension to the Countess Elinor of Desmond, and the confused litter of vellumbound and oak-bound books of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries-for there is nothing in the room (except the writer of these lines) that was not born when Ralegh lived here-all these things compel me to think of him, and I do my best to think well of him, but how can I? Who could think well of him here? As I look through the deep window where he often stood, I see the ruined tower of St. Mary's and the remains of the College of Youghal. They were built a hundred years before his time, as well as the warden's house in which he lived, by the eighth Earl of Desmond. In this spot I cannot think of Ralegh without thinking of Thomas Fitzgerald-a contrast not favourable to Ralegh.

The great Earl, to whom the modern occupant of Sir Walter's study thus referred, was the chief personage in the Pale for some years. He was Lord Deputy, but whilst he did his duty conscientiously to the foreign lord of Ireland, he was not insensible to the fact that there were people in Ireland who lived beyond the Pale. He called the first Parliament in which a real effort was made to establish something like fair dealing with the Irishry. He encouraged the commerce with the southern parts of Europe which had sprung up about the time that Edward the Second had farmed out the customs revenue of Cork, Youghal, and Waterford to Gerardo, a Florentine merchant, and the Friscobaldi had begun to send their wines from Livorno to Youghal. Like his contemporary Lorenzo de' Medici, he played a part in the revival of letters. He could not restore all the ruined seats of learning from Armagh to Cashel and Lismore that had fallen before civil war and foreign invasion, but he founded a college at Youghal in 1464 and gave the warden and fellows an endowment of 600l. per annum-a more generous endowment, looking to his in

come and the value of money in those days, than the Parliament has given to the Queen's Colleges and the Irish people themselves have given to the Catholic University in our time. Some of the specimens of early printing-1479 to 1483-which were found fifty years ago in a recess in the house built by the great Earl for the Warden of the College, were no doubt a part of the library then collected. The contrast between this generous effort to revive the ancient civilisation of the country and the Philistine policy of later times is remarkable.

Ralegh's career in Ireland determined his fate more perhaps than is usually supposed. On the other hand, his proceedings and those of his companions in Munster made a deep mark in Irish history. In fact he was one of the most daring and active of those eminent Englishmen who have done much to render British government permanently difficult-if not more than difficult-in Ireland.

British historians have touched but slightly on Ralegh's Irish exploits. Beyond the fact of his planting the potato for the first time in his garden near the old town-wall of Youghal, his smoking tobacco under the four intertwisted yew trees that still remain there, and his musings with Edmund Spenser, little is published of his Munster life. And yet it is still a fresh and living force in the unwritten history of the peasants from Youghal to Lismore, and along the banks of the Blackwater and the Lee from Imokilly to the mountains of Kerry. It is possible to meet men and women on the old ploughlands of the Desmond estate who speak nothing but Irish (in the Province of Munster there are thirty thousand peasants who at this day do not speak English), and from their stories to pick up more of the real doings of Ralegh and his comrades in Ireland than from Hume and the historians. That tradition-loving and long-memoried people as M. Thierry calls them, the most unchanging people on the face of the globe as Mr. Froude calls them, are not ignorant of the events of three hundred years ago, and they look upon them now much in the same way that their ancestors looked upon them then.

In his English in Ireland Mr. Froude makes no reference to Sir Walter Ralegh, and in his History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth, in which the war of the Desmonds is more fully described, he mentions him but once. Having touched on the Irish victory at Glenmalure in which the new Deputy, Lord Grey de Wilton, was defeated, the landing of two thousand Scots in Antrim under the Countess of Desmond, and the landing of some Spanish and Italian allies of the Irish in Dingle Bay, Mr. Froude says:

Meanwhile, Lord Grey having recovered as well as he could from his first calamity, and being reassured by a victory of Maltby's over the Burkes and the unexpected quiet of the rest of Ireland, gathered all the soldiers that he could raise, and set off with a small, but, from its composition, unusually interesting force, to attack the invaders by land. Ireland had become to young Englishmen of spirit a land of hope and adventure, where they might win glory and perhaps VOL. X.-No. 57. Y Y

fortune; and among the names of the officers who accompanied Grey are found those of Burghley's kinsman, young Mr. Cheke, of Edmund Spenser, and of Walter Ralegh.

Such is Mr. Froude's only mention of him. This omission is not less remarkable from the fact that in important events described by Mr. Froude Ralegh took a busy part; and for a score of years he was an influential adviser of Elizabeth, sometimes the most influential, in an Irish policy that, as Edmund Burke says, was never deviated from for a single hour during her reign.

Spenser was Assistant-Secretary to the Lord Deputy, and was then twenty-eight years of age. Ralegh was also in his twenty-eighth year when he sailed from the Isle of Wight for Ireland. He landed in Cove harbour with what he calls a footeband of one hundrethe men.' In his letter to Lord Burghley written from Cork on the 22nd of February 1580 he claims certain arrears, from which it seems that he was paid at the rate of four shillings a day for himself, two shillings a day for his lieutenant, fourteenpence a day for four other officers, and eightpence a day for every common soldier. To this company he was able to add a small number of horsemen with 'good furniture,' that is, suitable armour and trappings. They were mostly Devonshire men, and, like their captain, full of courage and energy. Even when, two years later, by the Queen's special order, he got the command of Captain Appesley's band also, the number of troops with which he operated was very small. The amount of destruction and conquest accomplished by those highly paid and well equipped men seems out of all proportion to their insignificant numbers. For some years the Irish fell before them as German tribes had fallen before the soldiers of Italy.

Captain Ralegh's 'Reckonings' in Ireland begin, according to the records in the Rolls Office, with the date July 13, 1580, a couple of months before Lord Grey's second government in Ireland, but some earlier record of his pay may have been lost. Whether or not he preceded the Lord Deputy to Ireland, he certainly accompanied him to the bay on the shores of the Atlantic where Admiral Winter and ViceAdmiral Bingham blockaded Desmond's six or seven hundred foreign allies. Hemmed in on all sides, the garrison of Smerwick Castle surrendered on the 10th of November 1580. Here is Mr. Froude's description of the way in which some of those young Englishmen of spirit began to win glory :

Don Bastian with the officers came out with ensigns trailing, and gave themselves up as prisoners. The men piled their arms outside the walls, and waited defenceless to learn the pleasure of their conquerors. They were strangers, and by this time alone. The officers were reserved for their ransom. Common prisoners were inconvenient and expensive, and it was thought desirable to read a severe lesson to Catholic sympathisers in Ireland. 'The Lord of hosts,' wrote Grey, 'had delivered the enemy to us, none of ours being hurt, Mr. Cheke alone excepted. Then put I in certain bands, who fell straight to execution.' A certain number of

the original party had fallen sick, and had been sent back to Spain. With the exception of these and of the officers, the entire party was slaughtered. A few women, some of them pregnant, were hanged. A servant of Saunders, an Irish gentleman, and a priest were hanged also. The bodies, six hundred in all, were stripped and laid out upon the sands, 'as gallant goodly personages,' said Grey, 'as ever were beheld.'

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Mr. Froude, after referring to Camden's statement that Lord Grey had shed tears and Queen Elizabeth had wished the cruelty undone, surmises that they might possibly have felt some pity for the subjects of the King of Spain which was refused to the wives and babies of the Irish chiefs.' But he gives good reasons for doubting Lord Grey's tears or the sincerity of the Queen's pity.

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Whoever was to blame for the occurrence, the English admiral had no complicity in it. Dr. Taylor in his History of Ireland says: To the relentless soldiery innocence furnished no protection; helpless infancy and tottering age found no mercy. Admiral Winter, however, with the humanity natural to a British sailor, was shocked by the horrid massacre, and granted protection to a few that escaped to his fleet.' But who was to blame? Lord Grey does not say what orders he gave to the bands he sent in, nor who commanded them. He does not mention Ralegh's name in his despatch of November 14 to the Privy Council. The question as to who was the actual executioner seems, however, to be set at rest by a passage in the contemporary narrative in Hooker's Supplement to the Chronicles of Holinshed, in which we are told that the people in the fort held out a white flag uttering the cry Misericordia, misericordia;' they then, at the Lord Deputy's request, disarmed themselves, all their armour and arms being laid in one place. Hooker then adds: In the fort Sir James Fitzgerald, Knight, and Lord of the Decies, was a prisoner by the order of the Earl of Desmond; and one Plunket, an Irishman, and one Englishman which came and accompanied the traitors out of Spaine. The knight was set at liberty, but the other two were executed. When the captain had yielded himself and the fort appointed to be surrendered, Captain Ralegh, together with Captain Macworth, who had the ward of that day, entered into the castle, and made a great slaughter, many or most part of them being put to the sword.' The exact number thus dealt with by Ralegh and Macworth, though not given in Hooker's Supplement, appears in Holinshed under the date An. Reg. 23 (1580). The fort was yeelded, all the Irish men and women hanged; and more than foure hundred Spaniards, Italians, and Biscaies put to the sword; the coronell, capteins, secretarie and others, to the number of twentie, saved for ransome.'

The chronicler Hooker, who was an Exeter man and a personal friend of Ralegh's, mentions in a]preceding page how the Spaniards had brought armour and munitions of war for five thousand mer 'because they knew that the Irishemen were of bodies sufficient,

that they lacked furniture (armour and proper weapons) and training; and in these two things they minded to furnish them.'

Some of Ralegh's exploits were such as would entitle him now-adays to the Victoria Cross. In his letter from Cork to Sir Francis Walsingham, of February 23, 1581, after he had been about a year in Ireland, he refers to an escape he had from the Seneschal of Imokilly when returning by a circuitous route from Dublin to Cork. His own account of the skirmish, which seems to have taken place at the Ballinacurra river, is very modest :

:

In my return from Develin I made a hard escape from the Seneshall in Barre's countre (wher he is always fostered) with xiiii horsmen and threescore footmen.

I was three horsmen, and soun set on horsbacke two Irishe footmen. I coveted to recover a litle old castle, in that resun I left three men and three horses. The manner of myne own behaviour I leve to the report of others, but the escape was strange to all men. The castle was a longe mile off from the place wher he first sett on us. Ther is great need of a supply in Murster, for the bandes are all miche decayed.

From that letter Walsingham would learn nothing of the fact that Ralegh most gallantly risked his own life to save one of his followers. Hooker's description of the affair is more minute:

The capteine (Ralegh) making his returne from Dubline, and the same well knowne unto the seneschall of Imokellie, through whose countrie he was to passe, laie in ambush for him to haue intrapped him betweene Youghall and Corke, lieng at a foord, which the said capteine must passe our with six horssemen, and certain kerne. The capteine little mistrusting anie such matter, had in his companie onelie two horssemen and foure shot on horsebacke, which was too small a force in so doubtfull and dangerous times: neuerthelesse he had a very good guide, which was the servant of John Fitzedmunds of Clone, a good subject, and this guide knew euerie corner and starting hole in those places.

ouer.

The capteine being come towards the foord, the seneschal had spied him alone, his companie being scattered behind, and verie fiercelie pursued him, and crossed him as he was to ride ouer water, but yet he recovered the foord and was passed The Irishman who was his guide, when he saw the capteine thus alone, and so narrowlie distressed, he shifted for himselfe and fled into a broken castell fast by, there to saue himselfe. The capteine being thus ouer the water, Henrie Moile, riding alone about a bowes shoot before the rest of his companie, when he was in the midle of the foord his horsse foundred and cast him downe; and being afraid that the seneschalls men would have folowed him and have killed him, cried out to the capteine to come and to save his life; who not respecting the danger he himselfe was in, came unto him, and recovered both him and his horsse. And then Moile wishing with all hast to leape up, did it with such hast and vehemencie that he quite over lept the horsse and fell into a mire fast by, and so his horsse ran awaie and was taken by the enemie. The capteine neverthelesse staid still, and did abide for the coming of the residue of his companie, of the foure shot which as yet were not come foorth, and for his man Jenkin who had about two hundred pounds in monie about him, and sat upon his horsse in the meane while, having his staffe in one hand, and his pistoll charged in the other hand.'

The chronicler adds that the Seneschal, though he was twenty to one in strength, would not face Ralegh's little band again when he saw the captain ready to receive the onset. A leader who risked his