not
realize was that it was too late now to go back. He had stood out for
what he considered his own rights when it would have been more politic
to have submitted, and now he wanted to submit when it was only too
plain to all who could read the signs of the times that the storm was
already upon him, and that no humility or late-found loyalty could avail
to avert that doom which hung over his house.

If Desmond himself was slow to rise, the whole South of Ireland was in a
state of wild tumult and excitement when the news of the actual arrival
of Fitzmaurice and the legate became known. Nor in the south alone. In
Connaught and the Pale the excitement was very little less. Kildare,
like Desmond, held back fearing the personal consequences of rebellion,
but all the younger lords of the Pale were eager to throw in their lot
with Fitzmaurice. Alone amongst the Irishmen of his day, he possessed
all the necessary qualifications of a leader. He had already for years
successfully resisted the English. He was known to be a man of great
courage and tenacity, and his reputation as a general stood deservedly
high in the opinion of all his countrymen.

[Illustration: CATHERINE, THE "OLD" COUNTESS OF DESMOND. (Reputed to
have been killed at the age of 120 by a fall from a cherry tree.) _(From
the Burne Collection.)_]

That extraordinary good fortune, however, which has so often befallen
England at awkward moments, and never more conspicuously than during the
closing years of the sixteenth century, did not fail now. Fitzmaurice
started for Connaught to encourage the insurrection which had been fast
ripening there under the brutal rule of Sir Nicolas Malby, its governor.
A trumpery quarrel had recently broken out between the Desmonds and the
Mayo Bourkes, and this insignificant affair sealed the fate of what at
one moment promised to be the most formidable rebellion which had ever
assailed the English power in Ireland. At a place called Harrington's
Bridge, not far from Limerick, where the little river Muckern or
Mulkearn was then crossed by a ford, Fitzmaurice was set upon by the
Bourkes. Only a few followers were with him at the time, and in turning
to expostulate with one of his assailants, he was killed by a pistol
shot, and fell from his horse. This was upon the 18th of August, 1579.
From that moment the Desmond rising was doomed.

Desmond meanwhile still sat vacillating in his own castle of Askeaton,
neither joining the rising,