of a Deputy, or the President of a province,
through the country is always accompanied with its tale of hangings.
There is sometimes a touch of the grotesque. "At Kilkenny," writes Sir
W. Drury, "the jail being full, we caused sessions immediately to begin.
Thirty-six persons were executed, among which some good ones; two for
treason, a blackamoor, and two witches by natural law, for that we found
no law to try them by in this realm." It is like the account of some
unusual kind of game in a successful bag. "If taking of cows, and
killing of kerne and churles had been worth advertizing," writes Lord
Grey to the Queen, "I would have had every day to have troubled your
Highness." Yet Lord Grey protests in the same letter that he has never
taken the life of any, however evil, who submitted. At the end of the
Desmond outbreak, the chiefs in the different provinces send in their
tale of death. Ormond complains of the false reports of his "slackness
in but killing three men," whereas the number was more than 3000; and he
sends in his "brief note" of his contribution to the slaughter, "598
persons of quality, besides 3000 or 4000 others, and 158 slain since his
discharge." The end was that, as one of the chief actors writes, Sir
Warham St. Leger, "Munster is nearly unpeopled by the murders done by
the rebels, and the killings by the soldiers; 30,000 dead of famine in
half a year, besides numbers that are hanged and killed. The realm," he
adds, "was never in greater danger, or in like misery." But in the
murderous work itself there was not much danger. "Our wars," writes Sir
Henry Wallop, in the height of the struggle, "are but like fox-hunting."
And when the English Government remonstrates against this system of
massacre, the Lord-Deputy writes back that "he sorrows that pity for the
wicked and evil should be enchanted into her Majesty."

And of this dreadful policy, involving, as the price of the extinction
of Desmond's rebellion, the absolute desolation of the South and West of
Ireland, Lord Grey came to be the deliberate and unfaltering champion.
His administration lasted only two years, and in spite of his natural
kindness of temper, which we need not doubt, it was, from the supposed
necessities of his position, and the unwavering consent of all English
opinions round him, a rule of extermination. No scruple ever crossed his
mind, except that he had not been sufficiently uncompromising in putting
first the religious aspect o