Proceeding of Drury.
Sir William Drury found plenty to do in his new government, though the county was free from any great disturbance. At Cork assizes forty-two persons were hanged, and one pressed to death; a chief of the MacSwiney gallowglasses, who had displayed a banner while driving cattle from under the walls of Cork, being among the sufferers. In derision the same banner was borne before the culprit to the place of execution. Nearly as many more were despatched at Limerick, the President’s object being to strike down the local ringleaders as much as possible. ‘They ride,’ he said, ‘all one horse, and the head of the salmon is worth a many small fishes.’ Like every other English governor, Drury complained of the number of idle men retained by territorial magnates. All he could do was to procure that registers should be kept, showing on whom each kerne or gallowglass was dependent, thus making the gentlemen responsible.[329]
Essex goes to England,
After the massacre of Rathlin, Essex determined to lead a private life. No place near Dublin was free from the prevailing infection, and he withdrew to Waterford to wait upon events.
He had half ruined himself and had failed entirely to do what he had proposed. ‘I have wasted no hour in Ireland,’ he told the Queen, ‘why should I wear out my youth in an obscure place without assurance of your good opinion, and should but increase the light of another man’s sun, and sit in the shadow myself?... I am no way carried with inconstancy, but loth to drown my service without certainty of friends and good opinion.’
where he offends the Queen,
but she soon relents.
In this temper he asked for leave to visit England. It was granted, and at the end of October 1575 he landed near his own house at Lanfey in Pembrokeshire. Even during the passage his ill-fortune pursued him. Vessels carrying his servants and baggage were dispersed by a storm, and the rough weather told upon his enfeebled frame. He was accompanied by Maltby, who was for the moment unemployed, and who thoroughly sympathised with him; but his health was so bad that Walsingham cautioned him not to travel too fast towards London. When he did arrive there he had still to complain of neglect, and of the expense to which he was put in dancing attendance on Queen and Ministers. Burghley found it necessary to ‘humiliate the style’ of the Earl’s letters before showing them to her Majesty, and he then wrote in a more submissive strain. It was this, probably, which elicited from the Queen one of those letters with which she well knew how to whistle back her disgusted servants. She congratulated him on his perfect conquest over his passions, which she attributed to the lessons of patience learned in the Irish service. ‘And though,’ she said, ‘you may think that it has been a dear conquest unto you in respect of the great care of mind, toil of body, and the intolerable charges you have sustained to the consumption of some good portion of your patrimony, yet if the great reputation you have gained be weighed in the balance of just value, or tried at the touchstone of true desert, it shall then appear that neither your mind’s care, your body’s toil, nor purse’s charge was unprofitably employed; for by the decay of those things that are subject to corruption and mortality you have, as it were, invested yourself with immortal renown, the true mark that every honourable mind ought to shoot at.... We think your demands made upon us were grounded both upon the respect of your own benefit and of our service, interpreting as we do the word benefit not to import that servile gain that base-minded men hunt after, but a desire to live in action and to make proof of your virtue; and being made of the metal you are, not unprofitably or rather reproachfully to fester in the delights of English Egypt, when the most part of those that are bred in that soil take great delight in holding their noses over the beef-pots.’[330]
Return and death of Essex.
In the end Essex received a grant of the barony of Farney in Monaghan, of the peninsula called Island Magee in Antrim, and of the office of Earl Marshal in Ireland for life. Having made his will and such other arrangements as were possible for the settlement of his estate, he returned to Ireland after an absence of about nine months. The leading of 300 men for which he had asked, and which Sidney recommended, would probably have been granted had not death cut his career short. He reached Dublin on July 23, 1576, and on August 30 was attacked by dysentery, which carried him off in three weeks.