tary service due from the lords
into money; then you can take up the fisheries now left to the French
and the Spaniards; then you can open and work your mines, and the
people will be able to grant you subsidies.'[1] When the lord deputy
arrived in Ireland he found a state of things in the Pale far worse
than he could have imagined. It was 'as it were overwhelmed with
vagabonds; plunder and spoils daily carried out of it; the people
miserable; not two gentlemen in the whole of it able to lend 20 l.;
without horse, armour, apparel, or victual. The soldiers were worse
than the people: so beggarlike as it would abhor a general to look on
them; never a married wife among them, and therefore so allied with
Irishwomen that they betrayed secrets, and could not be trusted on
dangerous service; so insolent as to be intolerable; so rooted in
idleness as there was no hope by correction to amend them.' In Munster
a man might ride twenty or thirty miles and find no houses standing
in a country which he had known as well inhabited as many counties in
England. 'In Ulster,' Sidney wrote, 'there tyrannizeth the prince of
pride; Lucifer was never more puffed up with pride and ambition than
that O'Neill is; he is at present the only strong and rich man in
Ireland, and he is the dangerest man and most like to bring the whole
estate of this land to subversion and subjugation either to him or
to some foreign prince, that ever was in Ireland.' He invited this
Lucifer to come into the Pale to see him, and Shane at first agreed to
meet him at Dundalk, but on second thoughts he politely declined, on
the ground that the Earl of Sussex had twice attempted to assassinate
him, and but for the Earl of Kildare would have put a lock upon
his hands when he was passing through Dublin to England. Hence his
'timorous and mistrustful people' would not trust him any more in
English hands. In fact O'Neill despised any honours the Queen could
confer upon him. 'When the wine was in him he boasted that he was in
blood and power better than the best of their earls, and he would give
place to none but his cousin of Kildare, because he was of his own
house. They had made a wise earl of M'Carthymore, but Shane kept as
good a man as he. Whom was he to trust? Sussex gave him a safe-conduct
and then offered him the courtesy of a handlock. The Queen had told
him herself that, though he had got a safe-conduct to come and go, the
document did not say when he was to go; and,