Fitzmaurice urged Burke to join the Catholic enterprise; he answered that he would be loyal to the Queen, and a fight followed. Burke had but two musketeers with him, one of whom aimed at Fitzmaurice, who was easily known by his yellow doublet. The ball penetrated his chest, and feeling himself mortally wounded, he made a desperate dash forward, killed Theobald Burke and one of his brothers, and then fell, with or without a second wound. ‘He found,’ says Hooker characteristically, ‘that the Pope’s blessings and warrants, his agnus Dei and his grains, had not those virtues to save him as an Irish staff, or a bullet, had to kill him.’ The Burkes returned after the death of their leader, and, having confessed to Dr. Allen, the best of the Geraldines breathed his last. Lest the knowledge of his death should prove fatal to his cause, a kinsman cut off Fitzmaurice’s head and left the bare trunk under an oak—an evidence of haste which shows that there was no great victory to boast of. The body was nevertheless recognised, carried to Kilmallock, and hanged on a gibbet; and the soldiers barbarously amused themselves by shooting at their dead enemy. ‘Well,’ says Russell, ‘there was no remedy—God’s will must be done, punishing the sins of the father in the death of the son. Fitzmaurice made a goodly end of his life (only that he bore arms against his sovereign princess, the Queen of England). His death was the beginning of the decay of the honourable house of Desmond, out of which never issued so brave a man in all perfection, both for qualities of the mind and body, besides the league between him and others for the defence of religion.’[21]
To face page 24.
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Edwd. Weller, lith.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Strype’s Annals, Eliz. lib. i. ch. i. and ii. i. Walsingham to Cecil, February 25, 1571, and Burghley to Walsingham, June 5, both in Digges’s Complete Ambassador. Lady Northumberland to Stukeley, June 21, 1571, in Wright’s Elizabeth. Answers of Martin de Guerres, master mariner, February 12, 1572; Examination of Walter French, March 30; report of John Crofton, April 13.
[2] Stukeley to Mistress Julian (from Rome) October 24, 1575, in Wright’s Elizabeth, Motley’s Dutch Republic, part v. ch. v.; Strype’s Annals, Eliz. book ii. ch. viii.; Wilson to Burghley and Walsingham, February 19, 1577, and to the Queen, May 1, both in the Calendar of S. P. Foreign; Henry Cheek to Burghley, March 29, 1577; Strype’s Life of Sir John Cheek. Stukeley left Don John at the end of February, 1577.
[3] Intelligence received by Drury, February 19, 1577, and April 16; Examination of Edmund MacGawran and others May 10; Paulet to Wilson, August, 1577, in Murdin’s State Papers.