the next morning were under Lambay Island,' where they had run in for shelter. Here news was brought them that Dublin Castle was taken. They did not believe it; but a council of war was held, and Skeffington resolved that for himself he might not risk the attempt to land; Brereton and Salisbury might try it, if they could do so without casting themselves away;' the deputy would go on to Waterford with the body of the army, and join Sir John St Loo, who had crossed to that port in the week preceding from Bristol.

Accordingly, on the morning of the 17th of October, Sir William Brereton, with five hundred men, sailed into the mouth of the Liffey; and running up the river, instead of an enemy drawn up to oppose his landing, he found the mayor and corporation waiting at the quay, with drums, and flags, and trumpets to welcome him as a deliverer.2

Skeffington was less successful; he remained under Lambay waiting for a wind for Waterford, and in the mean time Fitzgerald, hearing of the arrival of the fleet, was in force upon the hills overlooking the anchorage. The English commander, though aware that the insurgents were in the neighbourhood, allowed himself, with extreme imprudence, to land a detachment of troops, with directions to march to Dublin. He himself went

with the fleet to the Skerries, where he conceived, under

1 Fifteen miles north of Dublin; | State Papers, vol. ii. p. 203. immediately off Malahide.

2 Sir William Brereton and Sir John Salisbury to Henry VIII.:

3 A small harbour near Drog

heda.

false information, that a party of the rebels were lying. He found nothing there but a few fishing-boats; and while he was engaged in burning these, Fitzgerald attacked the division which had been sent on shore, and cut them off to a man. Nor was this the only misfortune. The pirate ships which had been watching Dublin Bay hovered round the fleet, cutting off straggling transports; and although one of them was chased and driven on shore, the small success poorly counterbalanced the injury which had been inflicted.1

After a week of this trifling, Skeffington consented

to resign his intention of going to Waterford, October 21. and followed Brereton into Dublin. Why he had delayed a day after discovering that the river and the city were open to him, it is impossible to conjecture.

1

Skeffington was prudently re- gerald] not only fortified and manned served in his report of these things divers ships at sea, for keeping and to Henry. He mentions having set letting, destroying and taking the a party on shore, but says nothing King's deputy, army, and subjects, of their having been destroyed; and that they should not land within the he could not have been ignorant of said land; but also at the arrival of their fate, for he was writing three the said army, the same Thomas, weeks after it, from Dublin. He accompanied with his uncles, servwas silent, too, of the injury which ants, adherents,. &c., falsely and he had received from the pirates, traitorously assembled themselves though eloquent on the boats which together upon the sea coast, for he burnt at the Skerries.-State keeping and resisting the King's Papers, vol. ii. p. 205. On first deputy and army; and the same reading Skeffington's despatch, I had time they shamefully murdered divers supposed that the brilliant victory' of the said army coming to land. claimed by the Irish historians (see And Edward Rowkes, pirate at the LELAND, vol. ii. p. 148) must have sea, captain to the said Thomas, debeen imaginary. The Irish Statute stroyed and took many of them.-Book, however, is too explicit to Act of Attainder of the Earl of Kilallow of such a hope. He [Fitz- | dare: 28 Hen. VIII. cap. 1.

But his presence was of little benefit, and only paralyzed his abler subordinates. As soon as he had brought his army into the city, he conceived that he had done as much as the lateness of the season would allow. The November weather having set in wild and wet,

November.

he gave up all thought of active measures till the return of spring; and he wrote to inform the King, with much self-approbation, that he was busy writing letters to the Irish chiefs, and making arrangements for a better government; that Lord Thomas Fitzgerald had been proclaimed traitor at the market-cross; and that he hoped, as soon as the chancellor and the vicar-general could come to an understanding, the said traitor might be pronounced excommunicated. All this was very well, and we learn to our comfort that in due time the excommunication was pronounced; but it was not putting down the rebellion-it was not the work for which he was sent to Ireland with three thousand English soldiers.

Fitzgerald, as soon as the army was landed, retired into the interior; but, finding that the deputy lay idle within the walls, he recovered heart, and at the head of a party of light horse reappeared within six miles of Dublin. Trim and Dunboyne, two populous villages, were sacked and burnt, and the blazing ruins must have been seen from the battlements of the Castle. Yet neither the insults of the rebels nor the entreaty of the inhabitants could move the imperturbable Skeffington.

1

Skeffington to Henry VIII.: State Papers, vol. ii. pp. 206-7.

He lay still within the city walls;1 and Fitzgerald, still further encouraged, despatched a fresh party of ecclesiastics to the Pope and the Emperor, with offers of allegiance and promises of tribute, giving out meanwhile in Ireland that he would be supported in the spring or summer by the long-talked-of Spanish army. Promises costing Charles V. nothing, he was probably liberal of them, and waited for the issue to decide how far they should be observed.

If this was so, the English deputy seemed to be determined to give the rebellion every chance of issuing as the Emperor desired. The soldiers were eager for employment, but Skeffington refused to give his officers an opportunity for distinction in which he did not share,3 and a few ineffectual skirmishes in the neighbourhood were the sole exploits which for five months they were

that the King held this land of the See of Rome; alledging the King and his realm to be heretics digressed from the obedience of the same, and of the faith Catholic. Wherefore his desire is to the Emperour and the Bishop of Rome, that they will aid him in defence of the faith Catholic against the King, promising that he will hold the said land of them, and pay tribute for the same, yearly.—Ibid. p. 222.

Accompanied with the number | and precedents which should prove of sixty or eighty horsemen, and about three hundred kerne and gallowglass, the traitor came to the town of Trim, and there not only robbed the same, but also burnt a great part thereof, and took all the cattle of the country thereabouts; and after that assaulted Dunboyne, within six miles to Dublin; and the inhabitants of the town defending themselves by the space of two days, and sending for succour to Dublin | . . . . in default of relief, he utterly destroyed and burnt the whole town. --Allen to Cromwell: State Papers, vol. ii. p. 220.

2 He hath sent divers muniments

My lord deputy desireth so much his own glory, that he would no man should make an enterprise except he were at it.-Ibid. p. 227.

allowed to achieve. One expedition, as far as Drogheda, the deputy indeed ventured, towards the end of November; and in the account of it which he sent to England, he wrote as if it were a matter of congratulation that he had brought his army back in safety. Nor were his congratulations, at least to himself, without reason, for he owed that safety to God and to fortune. He had allowed the archers to neglect the old precaution of taking cases for their bows. They were overtaken by a storm, which wetted the strings and loosened the feathers of the arrows; and thus, at disadvantage, they were intercepted in a narrow defile,1 and escaped only because the Irish were weak in numbers.

He excused himself for his shortcomings on the plea that he was in bad health—an adequate apology for his own inaction, but none for his appointment on a service so dangerous. Yet perhaps his failure is explained by the scene of it. Elsewhere, Sir William Skeffington may have been a gallant soldier and a reasonable man; but the fatal atmosphere of Ireland seems at all times to have had a power of prostrating English intellect. The Protector Cromwell alone was cased in armour which could defy its enchantments. An active officer might have kept the field without difficulty. The Master of the Rolls, to prove that the country, even in mid-winter, was practicable without danger, rode to Waterford in November with only three hundred horse, through the heart of the disturbed districts, and returned

1 Skeffington to Sir Edmund Walsingham: Ibid. p. 233.