terly demanded whether he and the other confederates meant to hasten to his relief. For O'Neill and O'Donnell, with their exhausted and weakened troops to abandon the north and undertake a winter march southward, was plain destruction. At least it staked everything on the single issue of success or defeat before Kinsale, and to prevent defeat and to insure success there, much greater organization for coöperation and concert, and much more careful preparation, were needed than was possible now, hurried southward in this way by D'Aquilla. Nevertheless, there was nothing else for it. O'Neill clearly discerned that the crafty and politic Carew had been insidiously working on the Spanish commander, to disgust him with the enterprise, and induce him to sail homeward on liberal terms. And it was so. Don Juan, it is said, agreed, or intimated that if, within a given time, an Irish army did not appear to his relief, he would treat with Carew for terms. It was, therefore, probable disaster for O'Neill to proceed to the south, it was certain ruin for him to refuse ; so with heavy hearts the northern chieftains set out on their winter march for Munster, at the head of their thinned and wasted troops. "O'Donnell, with his habitual ardor, was first on the way. He was joined by Felim O'Doherty, MacSwiney-na-Tuath, O'Boyle, O'Rorke, the brother of O'Connor Sligo, the O'Connor Roe, MacDermott, O'Kelly, and others; mustering in all about two thousand five hundred men." O'Neill, with MacDonnell of Antrim, MacGennis of Down, MacMahon of Monaghan, and others of his suffragans, marched southward at the head of between three and four thousand men. Holy-Cross was the point where both their forces appointed to effect their junction. O'Donnell was first at the rendezvous. A desperate effort on the part of Carew to intercept and overwhelm him before O'Neill could come up, was defeated only by a sudden night-march of nearly forty miles by Red Hugh. O'Neill reached Belgooley, within sight of Kinsale, on the 21st of December.

In Munster, in the face of all odds-amidst the wreck of the national confederacy, and in the presence of an overwhelming army of occupation-a few chiefs there were, undismayed and

unfaltering, who rallied faithfully at the call of duty. Foremost amongst these was Donal O'Sullivan, Lord of Beare, a man in whose fidelity, intrepidity, and military ability, O'Neill appears to have reposed unbounded confidence. In all the south, the historian tells us, “only O'Sullivan Beare, O'Driscoll, and O'Connor Kerry declared openly for the national cause" in this momentous crisis. Some of the missing ships of the Spanish expedition reached Castlehaven in November, just as O'Donnell, who had made a detour westward, reached that place. Some of this Spanish contingent were detailed as garrisons for the forts of Dunboy, Baltimore, and Castlehaven, commanding three of the best havens in Munster. The rest joined O'Donnell's division, and which soon sat down before Kinsale.

46

When O'Neill came up, his master-mind at once scanned the whole position, and quickly discerned the true policy to be pursued. The English force was utterly failing in commissariat arrangements; and disease as well as hunger was committing rapid havoc in the besiegers' camp. O'Neill accordingly resolved to besiege the besiegers; to increase their difficulties in obtaining provision or provender, and to cut up their lines of communication. These tactics manifestly offered every advantage to the Irish and allied forces, and were certain to work the destruction of Carew's army. But the testy Don Juan could not brook this slow and cautious mode of procedure. The Spaniards only felt their own inconveniences; they were cut off from escape by sea by a powerful English fleet; and," continues the historian, "Carew was already practising indirectly on their commander his 'wit and cunning' in the fabrication of rumors and the forging of letters. Don Juan wrote urgent appeals to the northern chiefs to attack the English lines without another day's delay; and a council of war in the Irish camp, on the third day after their arrival at Belgooley, decided that the attack should be made on the morrow." At this council, so strongly and vehemently was O'Neill opposed to the mad and foolish policy of risking an engagement, which, nevertheless, O'Donnell, ever impetuous, as violently supported, that for the first time the two friends

were angrily at issue, and some writers even allege that on this occasion question was raised between them as to who should assume command-in-chief on the morrow. However this may have been, it is certain that once the vote of the council was taken, and the decision found to be against him, O'Neill loyally acquiesced in it, and prepared to do his duty. "On the night of the 2d January (new style)-24th December old style, in use among the English-the Irish army left their camp in three divisions: the vanguard led by Tyrrell, the centre by O'Neill, and the rear by O'Donnell. The night was stormy and dark, with continuous peals and flashes of thunder and lightning. The guides lost their way, and the march, which even by the most circuitous route ought not to have exceeded four or five miles, was protracted through the whole night. At dawn of day, O'Neill, with whom were O'Sullivan and O'Campo, came in sight of the English lines, and to his infinite surprise found the men under arms, the cavalry in troops posted in advance of their quarters. O'Donnell's division was still to come up, and the veteran earl now found himself in the same dilemma into which Bagnal had fallen at the Yellow Ford. His embarrassment was perceived from the English camp; the cavalry were at once ordered to advance. For an hour O'Neill maintained his ground alone; at the end of that time he was forced to retire. Of O'Campo's 300 Spaniards, 40 survivors were with their gallant leader taken prisoners; O'Donnell at length arrived and drove back a wing of the English cavalry; Tyrrell's horsemen also held their ground tenaciously. But the route of the centre proved irremediable. Fully 1,200 of the Irish were left dead on the field, and every prisoner taken was instantly executed. On the English side fell Sir Richard Graeme: Captains Danvers and Godolphin, with several others, were wounded; their total loss they stated at two hundred, and the Anglo-Irish, of whom they seldom made count in their reports, must have lost in proportion. The earls of Thomond and Clanricarde were actively engaged with their followers, and their loss could hardly have been less than that of the English regulars.

"On the night following their defeat, the Irish leaders held

council together at Innishannon, on the river Bandon, where it was agreed that O'Donnell should instantly take shipping for Spain to lay the true state of the contest before Philip the Third; that O'Sullivan should endeavor to hold his castle of Dunboy, as commanding a most important harbor; that Rory O'Donnell, second brother of Hugh Roe, should act as chieftain of Tyrconnell, and that O'Neil! should return into Ulster to make the best defence in his power. The loss in men was not irreparable; the loss in arms, colors, and reputation, was more painful to bear, and far more difficult to retrieve." *

XLV.-" THE LAST LORD OF BEARA." HOW DONAL OF DUNBOY WAS ASSIGNED A PERILOUS PROMINENCE, AND NOBLY UNDERTOOK ITS DUTIES. HOW DON JUAN'S IMBECILITY OR TREASON RUINED THE IRISH CAUSE.

ONFESSEDLY for none of the defeated chiefs did the day's disaster at Kinsale involve such consequences as it presaged for the three southern leaders-O'Sullivan, O'Driscoll, and O'Connor Kerry. The northern chieftains returning homeward, retired upon and within the strong lines of what we may call the vast entrenched camp of the native cause. But the three southerns-who alone of all their Munster compeers had dared to take the field against the English side in the recent crisis-were left isolated in a distant extremity of the island, the most remote from native support or coöperation, left at the mercy of Carew, now master of Munster, and leader of a powerful army flushed with victory. The northerns might have some chance, standing together and with a considerable district almost entirely in their hands, of holding out, or exacting good terms as they had done often before. But for the doomed southern chiefs, if aid from Spain came not soon, there was literally no prospect but the swift and immediate crash of Carew's vengeance;

"M'Gee.

no hope save what the strong ramparts of Dunboy and the stout heart of its chieftain might encourage!

O'Neill, as I have already remarked, had a high opinion of O'Sullivan of his devotedness to the national cause-of his prudence, skill, foresight, and courage. And truly the character of the "last Lord of Beara" as writ upon the page of history--as depicted by contemporary writers, as revealed to us in his correspondence, and as displayed in his career and actions from the hour when, at the call of duty, with nothing to gain and all to peril, he committed himself to the national struggle is one to command respect, sympathy, and admiration. In extent of territorial sway and in" following" he was exceeded by many of the southern chiefs, but his personal character seems to have secured for him by common assent the position amongst them left vacant by the imprisonment of Florence Mac Carthy, facile princeps among the Irish of Munster, now fast held in London tower. In manner, temperament, and disposition, O'Sullivan was singularly unlike most of the impulsive ardent Irish of his time. He was of deep, quiet, calm demeanor; grave and thoughtful in his manner, yet, notably firm and inflexible in all that touched his personal honor, his duty towards his people,* or his loyalty to religion or country. His family had flung themselves into the struggle of James Geraldine, and suffered the penalties that followed thereupon. Early in Elizabeth's reign, Eoghan, or Eugene, styled by the English Sir Owen O'Sullivan, contrived to possess himself of the chieftaincy and territory of Beara, on the death of his brother Donal, father of the hero of Dunboy. Eugene accepted an English title, sat in Lord Deputy Perrot's parliament of 1585, in the records of which we find his name.

Nothing strikes the reader of Donal's correspondence with king Philip and the Spanish ministers, more forcibly than the constant solicitude, the deep feeling, and affectionate attachment he exhibits towards his " poor people," as he always calls them. Amidst the wreck of all his hopes, the loss of worldly wealth and possessions, home, country, friends, his chief concern is for his " poor people" abandoned to the persecution of the merciless English foe. In all his letters it is the same. No murmur, no repining for himself, but constant solicitude about Ireland, and constant sorrow for his poor people, left “like sheep without a shepherd when the storm shuts out the sky."