In the summer of 1595, the periodical plague of London was thinning out the inhabitants of that dirty city. In the lower part of the city skirting the Thames, the sewerage was very bad and but the poorest sanitary rules existed. After a hard rain, the lanes, alleys and streets ran with a stream of putrefaction, as the offal from many tenement houses was thrown in the public highway, where the rays from the hot sun created malarial fever or the black plague.
At such times the theatres and churches were closed, and those who could get out of London, by land or water, fled to the inland shires of England, the mountains of Scotland or to the heather hills of Ireland.
Edmund Spenser, the poet and Secretary of Lord Gray for Ireland, invited William and myself to visit his Irish estate near the city of Cork.
One bright morning in May, we boarded the good ship Elizabeth, near the Tower, passed out of Gravesend, then into the channel and steered our way to Bantry Bay, until we landed in the cove of Cork, as the church bells were ringing devotees to early mass.
The green fields and hills of Ireland were blooming in rustic beauty, the thrush sang from every hawthorn bush, the blackbird was busy in the fields filching grain from the ploughman, the lark, in his skyward flight poured a stream of melody on the air, and all Nature seemed happy, but man.
He it is who makes the blooming productive earth miserable, with his voracious greed for gold and power.
Elizabeth was then waging war with the various Irish chieftains, importing cunning Scotchmen and brutal Englishmen as soldiers and traders to colonize the lands and destroy the homes of what she was pleased to call "Barbarous, rebellious, wild Irish."
Whenever any strong power invades a weaker one for the purpose of robbery and official murder (war), the tyrant labels his victim—a "Rebel!"
That is, the original owner of the land destined to be robbed is regarded as bigoted, barbarous and rebellious, unless he submits to be robbed, banished and murdered for the edification and glory of freebooters, thieves, tyrants, assassins and foreign man hunters.
Leinster, Munster, Ulster and Connaught, the four provinces of Ireland, had been marked out for settlement by Henry the Eighth and Queen Elizabeth, and hordes of English "carpetbaggers" and soldiers were turned loose on the island to rob, burn and destroy the natives.