Of the six hundred slain, four hundred
were as gallant and goodly personages as of any (soldiers) I
ever beheld. So hath it pleased the Lord of Hosts to deliver
your enemies into your Highnesses' hand, and so too as one
only excepted, not one of yours is either lost or hurt.

Another account adds to this that "the Irish men and women were hanged,
with an Englishman who had served Dr. Sanders, and two others whose arms
and legs were broken for torture."

Such scenes as those of Glenmalure and Smerwick, terrible as they were,
it might have been any one's lot to witness who found himself in
presence of the atrocious warfare of those cruel days, in which the
ordinary exasperation of combatants was made more savage and unforgiving
by religious hatred, and by the license which religious hatred gave to
irregular adventure and the sanguinary repression of it. They were not
confined to Ireland. Two years later the Marquis de Santa Cruz treated
in exactly the same fashion a band of French adventurers, some eighty
noblemen and gentlemen and two hundred soldiers, who were taken in an
attempt on the Azores during a time of nominal peace between the crowns
of France and Spain. In the Low Countries, and in the religious wars of
France, it need not be said that even the 'execution' at Smerwick was
continually outdone; and it is what the Spaniards would of course have
done to Drake if they had caught him. Nor did the Spanish Government
complain of this treatment of its subjects, who had no legal commission.

But the change of scene and life to Spenser was much more than merely
the sight of a disastrous skirmish and a capitulation without quarter.
He had passed to an entirely altered condition of social life; he had
passed from pleasant and merry England, with its comparative order and
peace, its thriving homesteads and wealthy cities, its industry and
magnificence,--

Eliza's blessed field,
That still with people, peace, and plenty flows--

to a land, beautiful indeed, and alluring, but of which the only law was
disorder, and the only rule failure. The Cambridge student, the follower
of country life in Lancashire or Kent, the scholar discussing with
Philip Sidney and corresponding with Gabriel Harvey about classical
metres and English rimes; the shepherd poet, Colin Clout, delicately
fashioning his innocent pastorals, his love complaints, or his dexterous
panegyrics or satires;