Photo by W. Leonard
Buttevant Barracks
His son, for rebellion, did not fare so well with Henry VIII., as, with five of his uncles, he perished on the scaffold and his family was only saved from extinction by having his youngest brother smuggled over to France to return to home and restored estates when Edward VI. sat on the throne.
Do not, however, for a moment imagine that that family "lived happily for ever after." Certainly not with such blood flowing in their veins and with Elizabeth Tudor wearing the crown, during whose reign the sixteenth Earl of Desmond did all he could to prevent his name from sinking into oblivion. He became conspicuous as an "ingenious rebel" and the Queen speaks of him in one of her letters as "a nobleman not brought up where law and justice had been frequent," by which I presume her Majesty meant that he had forgotten that the words "law" and "justice" meant the royal "will" and "desire" only. We have had some such forgetfulness in our own land of late years. Desmond was of such power that he could raise a company of five hundred men of his own name alone, all of whom and his own life also he lost in three years' time. There is little doubt that he was driven to rebellion by wrong and oppression, as he and his estates were objects of envy to every other chieftain of Ireland. His greatest enemy, the Earl of Ormond, was finally empowered by the crown to crush him and in the end succeeded. Desmond, "trusting no home or castle," was driven to woods and bogs and finally captured in a ruined hovel where his head was struck off and sent to the Queen "pickled in a pipkin." His executioner, a soldier named "Daniel Kelly," received a pension of twenty pounds from the crown but for some later act was hanged at Tyburn.
With James, the son of this Desmond, the power of the family terminated. He became a Protestant and the only one of his name. It is useless to state that the followers of his ancient house would not tolerate such a lapse and upon his only visit to Kilmalloch he was spat upon on his return from church. That drove him to London, where he died.