a close connection. The exiled chieftain was
welcomed at Madrid as a good Catholic flying from heretical persecutors.
His illustrious descent and princely dignity, which to the English
were subjects of ridicule, secured to him the respect of the Castilian
grandees. His honours were inherited by a succession of banished men who
lived and died far from the land where the memory of their family was
fondly cherished by a rude peasantry, and was kept fresh by the songs
of minstrels and the tales of begging friars. At length, in the
eighty-third year of the exile of this ancient dynasty, it was
known over all Europe that the Irish were again in arms for their
independence. Baldearg O'Donnel, who called himself the O'Donnel, a
title far prouder, in the estimation of his race, than any marquisate or
dukedom, had been bred in Spain, and was in the service of the Spanish
government. He requested the permission of that government to repair to
Ireland. But the House of Austria was now closely leagued with England;
and the permission was refused. The O'Donnel made his escape, and by a
circuitous route, in the course of which he visited Turkey, arrived at
Kinsale a few days after James had sailed thence for France. The effect
produced on the native population by the arrival of this solitary
wanderer was marvellous. Since Ulster had been reconquered by the
Englishry, great multitudes of the Irish inhabitants of that province
had migrated southward, and were now leading a vagrant life in Connaught
and Munster. These men, accustomed from their infancy to hear of the
good old times, when the O'Donnel, solemnly inaugurated on the rock of
Kilmacrenan by the successor of Saint Columb, governed the mountains
of Donegal in defiance of the strangers of the pale, flocked to the
standard of the restored exile. He was soon at the head of seven or
eight thousand Rapparees, or, to use the name peculiar to Ulster,
Creaghts; and his followers adhered to him with a loyalty very different
from the languid sentiment which the Saxon James had been able to
inspire. Priests and even Bishops swelled the train of the adventurer.
He was so much elated by his reception that he sent agents to France,
who assured the ministers of Lewis that the O'Donnel would, if furnished
with arms and ammunition, bring into the field thirty thousand Celts
from Ulster, and that the Celts of Ulster would be found far superior in
every military quality to those of Leinster, Munste