the rebel countries,' wrote Pelham, 'in two companies, burning with
fire _all habitations, and executing the people_ wherever we found
them.' Mr. Froude says: '_Alone_ of all the English commanders he
expressed remorse at the work.' Well, if the creatures they destroyed
were horses, dogs, or cats, we should expect a man of ordinary human
feelings to be shocked at the wholesale butchery. But the beings
slaughtered were men and women and children--Christians found unarmed
and defenceless in their dwellings. Let the English imagine such a
war carried on in Kent or Yorkshire, by Irish invaders, killing in
the name of the Pope. The Irish Annalists say that Pelham and Ormond
killed the blind and the aged, women and children, sick and idiots,
sparing none.

The English, as usual, had help from an Irish chief in the work of
destruction. Ormond had in his train M'Carthymore, 'who, believing
Desmond's day to be done, hoped, by making himself useful, to secure
a share of the plunder.' Dividing their forces, Pelham marched on to
Dingle, 'destroying as he went, with Ormond parallel to him on the
opposite side of the bay, the two parties watching each other's course
at night across the water by the flames of the burning cottages!'

The fleet was waiting at Dingle. There was a merry meeting of the
officers. 'Here,' says Sir Nicholas White, 'my lord justice and I
gathered cockles for our supper.'[1] The several hunting parties
compared notes in the evening. Sometimes the sport was bad. On one
occasion Pelham reported that his party had hanged a priest in the
Spanish dress. 'Otherwise,' he says, 'we took small prey, and
killed less people, though we reached many places in our travel!' At
Killarney they found the lakes full of salmon. In one of the islands
there was an abbey, in another a parish church, in another a castle,
'out of which there came to them a fair lady, the rejected wife of
Lord Fitzmaurice.' Even the soldiers were struck with the singular
loveliness of the scene. 'A fairer land,' one of them said, 'the
sun did never shine upon--pity to see it lying waste in the hands of
traitors.' Mr. Froude, who deals more justly by the Irish in his last
volumes, replies: 'Yet it was by those traitors that the woods whose
beauty they so admired had been planted and fostered. Irish hands,
unaided by English art or English wealth, had built Muckross and
Innisfallen and Aghadoe, and had raised the castles on whose walls the
modern poet w