Of the glories of that abbey, of its rich glass, its gold and silver work, its sculptured tombs, its organs, nothing now remains but a bare fragment of wall. In the year that Silken Thomas and his five uncles were hanged at Tyburn (1537), Lord Leonard Grey wasted the land of O’Connor Faly, who had married the sister of Earl Thomas; making him “more like a beggar, than he that ever was a captain or ruler of a country.” Vast quantities of corn stored up at Killeigh were carried to the Pale; and from the ruined Abbey Grey furnished out the buildings of Maynooth, which had been stormed and taken from Earl Thomas two years before; carrying off from its sack a pair of organs and other necessary things for the King’s College at Maynooth, and as much glass as was needed to glaze the windows of the College and of His Grace’s Castle there. The tombs of the great house of O’Connor Faly were utterly destroyed so that no trace of them remains.
The destruction of the great abbey was the symbol to the Leinster Irish of their final desolation, the ruin which submerged the whole people of Ireland on the fall of the House of Kildare. Then began in the rich plains of Leinster the ruthless policy of wholesale extirpation of the Irish old inhabitants, to “plant” the country anew from across the sea. The fruitful land became to Irish eyes a vast cemetery of their dead. In their lamentation they remembered that Brian Boru’s grave was there, and the grave of his son “that bore the brunt of weapon-fight”: and still the graves were multiplied. “Great are the charges that all others have against the land of Leinster”—a poet of the O’Byrnes sang.... “Charges against her all Ireland’s nobles have: that beneath the salmon-abounding Leinster country’s soil—region of shallow rivers foamy-waved—there is many a grave of their kings and of their heirs apparent.” “The red-handed Leinster province” holds the bones of the long line of O’Connor Faly, men and women who adorned their country with courage and piety, art and learning.
“They shall be remembered for ever,
They shall be speaking for ever,
The people shall hear them for ever.”
CHAPTER IV
A CASTLE AT ARDGLASS.
THE “island of Lecale,” as the Elizabethan English called it, lies in the County of Down, surrounded on three sides by the sea, and on the fourth bounded by the Quoile and Blackstaff rivers. The northern coast of the “island” almost closes the mouth of Lough Cuan, now Strangford Lough, leaving but a narrow strait for boats to pass. On the south it bounds the Bay of Dundrum, across which rises the huge granite mass of the Mourne Mountains.
