.

This piece of work satisfactorily finished, Grey returned rapidly to
Dublin to crush the Leinster insurgents. Kildare and Delvin, though they
had kept themselves clear of the rebellion, were arrested and thrown
into prison. Small bands of troopers were sent into the Wicklow
mountains to hunt out the insurgents. Baltinglass escaped to the
Continent, but the two Eustaces his brothers, with Garrot O'Toole and
Feagh McHugh were caught, killed, and their heads sent to Dublin.
Clanricarde's two sons, the Mac-an-Earlas, were out in the Connemara
mountains and could not be got at; but Malby again overran their
country, burning houses and slaughtering without mercy. In Dublin, the
Anglo-Irishmen of the Pale were being brought to trial for treason, and
hung or beheaded in batches. Kildare was sent to England to die in the
Tower. With the exception of the North, which on this occasion had kept
quiet, the whole country had become one great reeking shambles; what
sword and rope and torch had spared, famine came in to complete.

The Earl of Desmond was now a houseless fugitive, hunted like a wolf or
mad dog through the valleys and over the mountains of his own ancestral
"kingdom." His brothers had already fallen. Sir John Fitzgerald had been
killed near Cork, and his body hung head downwards, by Raleigh's order,
upon the bridge of the river Lee. The other brother, Sir James, had met
with a similar fate. Saunders, the legate, had died of cold and
exposure. Desmond alone escaped, time after time, and month after month.
Hunted, desperate, in want of the bare necessities of life, he was still
in his own eyes the Desmond, ancestral owner of nearly a hundred miles
of territory. Never in his most successful period a man of any
particular strength of character, sheer pride seems to have upheld him
now. He scorned to make terms with his hated enemy, Ormond. If he
yielded to any one, he sent word, it would be only to the queen herself
in person. He was not given the chance. Hunted over the Slemish
mountains, with the price of L1,000 on his head, one by one the trusty
companions who had clung to him so faithfully were taken and killed. His
own course could inevitably be but a short one. News reached the English
captain at Castlemain one night that the prey was not far off. A dozen
English soldiers stole up the stream in the grey of the morning. The
cabin where the Desmond lay was surrounded, the door broken in, and the
earl stabbed before t