The rest of the garrison retired to the keep. In the morning the attackers burned the heavy wooden door which guarded the stairway, but they had to wait two hours for the smoke to clear away. As soon as it had done so, one of the garrison appeared to ask for the lives of his comrades if they surrendered, but it appears he gave himself up before an answer was returned.
The officers and men then ascended the stairs in single file as the width of the passage necessitated, but met with no opposition, the garrison having retired to the battlements, which were protected only by one door.
Here a terrible hand to hand encounter took place. Some of the warders were killed, while the rest jumped from the parapet into the water below, and were either drowned or killed by the guards stationed beneath the tower.
The English lost ten soldiers and one ensign, while about twenty-one men were wounded. Of the defenders of the castle about eighty men were killed, while the Four Masters state that some women and children also lost their lives. They remark that the place would not have been so easily won had not the “Earl of Desmond’s people dispersed from him.”
The rebels had burned the town of Glin upon the approach of the Royal troops.
During the rising the castle had been used as a storehouse for the “Sugan Earl’s” forces, and a Limerick merchant called Anthony Arthurs seems to have dispensed his goods from it.
Sir George Carew placed a guard of twenty-one soldiers in it under the command of Captain Nicholas Mordant.
Edmund FitzGerald, Knight of the Valley, was restored to most of his estates in 1603, and six years later he appealed to the Lords of the Council against Patrick Crosby obtaining Glin Castle by the King’s letter, on the pretext that it was kept from the Knight to prevent his rebelling. Crosby had undertaken to repair and fortify the fortress at his own cost. The Knight stated he had been pardoned by Lord Mountjoy, that his lands had been restored, and shortly afterwards the castle as well.
The next year Sir Arthur Chichester explains that the building was occupied only by Anthony Arthur, who sold wines in it, and that he had therefore given it to Crosby. He also stated that the Knight’s eldest son was abroad.
In 1681 the castle was in the possession of Major FitzGerald.