here was time for him to spring from his bed. The
tragedy had now been played out to the bitterest end. As formerly with
the Leinster Geraldines, so now with the Munster ones, of the direct
heirs of the house only a single child was left, a feeble boy,
afterwards known by the significant title of the "Tower Earl," with the
extinguishing of whose sickly tenure of life the very name of Desmond
ceases to appear upon the page of Irish history.

XXVII.

BETWEEN TWO MORE STORMS.

Two great risings against Elizabeth's power in Ireland had thus been met
and suppressed. A third and a still more formidable one was yet to come.
The interval was filled with renewed efforts at colonization upon a yet
larger scale than before. Munster, which at the beginning of the Desmond
rising had been accounted the most fertile province in Ireland, was now
little better than a desert. Not once or twice, but many times the
harvest had been burnt and destroyed, and great as had been the
slaughter, numerous as were the executions, they had been far eclipsed
by the multitude of those who had died of sheer famine.

Spenser's evidence upon this point has been often quoted, but no other
words will bring the picture before us in the same simple, awful
vividness; nor must it be forgotten that the man who tells it was under
no temptation to exaggerate having himself been a sharer in the deeds
which had produced so sickening a calamity.

"They were brought to such wretchedness," he says, "that any stony heart
would rue the same. Out of every corner of the woods and glens, they
came, creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear
them. They looked like anatomies of death; they spoke like ghosts crying
out of their graves. They did eat the dead carrions, where they did find
them, yea and one another soon after, in as much as the very carcases
they spared not to scrape out of their graves; and if they found a plot
of watercresses or shamrocks, there they thronged as to a feast."

To replace this older population, thus starved, slaughtered, made away
with by sword and pestilence with new colonists was the scheme of the
hour. Desmond's vast estate, covering nearly six hundred thousand Irish
acres, not counting waste land, had all been declared forfeit to the
Crown. This and a considerable portion of territory also forfeit in
Leinster was now offered to English colonists upon the most advantageous
terms. No rent was to be paid at first,