The Life And Letters of the Great Earl of Cork

at the outbreak of the rebellion. But he had arrived in England as a fugitive, a ruined landowner, and a prisoner who had broken bail; he returned to Ireland buoyed up by the hopes and ambitions of the men who were resolved to create a new Munster. The history of the way in which they pacified Ireland was told by Carew himself in his Pacata Hibernia? and although there are but two allusions to Boyle by name in that brilliant narrative, it makes us realise, as no other book but the Faery Queen can do, in what sort of times Boyle lived, what manner of men were his comrades, and under what teacher he learned the art of government. This Munster war was but a fresh outbreak of the flames that had been smouldering there since the time of the great Desmond rebellion, and now had wakened to fresh life at the call of Tyrone and Red Hugh O'Donnell from Ulster. 1 Pacata Hibcrnia was published under the name of Carew's son, Sir Thomas Stafford, but Boyle always speaks of it as Carew's book. The English had hoped that Munster was pacified, when, sixteen years before, the luckless old Earl of Desmond had been run to ground by the English in a herdsman's hut, and his silver head struck off and sent to blacken on London Bridge. His only son, young James Fitzgerald, could see it plain enough from the window of the prison in the Tower where he was kept caged from his childhood. The poor boy was the Queen's godson, and as the true representative of the great Desmon...