Whatever hopes Desmond himself may have had from Grey, the change of government was not favourable to the chances of a rebellion near Dublin. The advent of a governor of high rank generally signified increased force, a more liberal expenditure of money, and more activity in official circles. Lord Chancellor Gerard had just landed on a part of the coast over which Baltinglas was for the moment supreme; and the latter had unaccountably neglected to make him a hostage. ‘Compared with the rest of his doings,’ said Pelham, ‘this doth argue that both he and his followers be the most foolish traitors that ever I heard of.’ The Chancellor reported that all the Leinster chiefs as well as O’Neill, O’Donnell, O’Rourke, and O’Connor Sligo were sworn to Baltinglas, and that he had the hearts of the whole country. The rebels had burned Harrington’s town of Newcastle, and openly displayed the Pope’s banner; but Kildare seemed to stand firm, and comforted the Chancellor by abusing the captains for giving false musters, saying that the Queen paid for 1,300 when she had only 700. But his most trusted follower, Gerald Fitzmaurice, had joined the rebels with his company. Sir William Stanley brought reinforcements from England, but in such plight as to argue no great probability of good service. Out of 120 calivers scarce twenty were serviceable, and the men were raw, ill-provided with necessaries, and fewer than their leader had been given to expect. The captains, blamed by Kildare, said their pay was at least three months in arrear, and of course all their men were discontented. Gormanston lay at Naas with 500 men, but the distrust was so general that Archbishop Loftus believed the throats of all Englishmen were about to be cut. ‘Unless strangers land,’ the Chancellor remarked, ‘I mistrust; and if they do I am of the Archbishop’s mind.’ Meanwhile the country south of Dublin was at the mercy of the rebels, and it was easy to know who sympathised with them. ‘They religiously prey,’ said Gerard, ‘overskipping some, many have taken oaths not to fight against them.’ 2,000 Scots were plundering loyal people in Ulster, and it was hard to see where it was to stop.[52]
Grey attacks the Irish in Glenmalure.
Baltinglas and Feagh MacHugh lay in the valley of the Liffey, somewhere about Ballymore Eustace. On the approach of Grey’s army from the side of Naas they withdrew into Glenmalure, a deep and rocky fortress—a combe, as the Devonian Hooker calls it—to the N.E. of Lugnaquilla. The glen was thickly wooded, and at least four miles long, and Colonel George Moore was ordered to enter it with about half the army. Grey was more a knight-errant than a general, and he determined to attack at once and in front, though warned by those about him of the risk he was running. His object was to drive the rebels from the covert, so that they might be shot or ridden down on the open hillside. Old Francis Cosby, general of the Queen’s kerne, who was a man of extraordinary personal courage and of unrivalled experience in Irish warfare, foresaw the danger; but he was not listened to, and he boldly advanced to what he believed to be almost certain death. Jacques Wingfield, the Master of the Ordinance, who doubtless remembered his own overthrow nineteen years before, was present with his two nephews, Peter and George Carew, and he vainly tried to dissuade them from risking their lives. ‘If I lose one,’ he then urged, ‘yet will I keep the other,’ and George, reserved, as Camden says, for greater things, consented to stay by his uncle. Sir Peter, with Captain Audley and Lieutenant Parker, were with Colonel Moore in front, while Sir Henry Bagenal and Sir William Stanley brought up the rear. ‘When we entered,’ says Stanley, ‘the foresaid glen, we were forced to slide sometimes three or four fathoms ere we could stay our feet. It was in depth at least a mile, full of stones, rocks, bogs, and wood; in the bottom a river full of loose stones, which we were driven to cross divers times. So long as our leaders kept the bottom, the odds were on our side. But our colonel, being a corpulent man, before we were half through the glen, being four miles in length, led us up the hill that was a long mile in height; it was so steep that we were forced to use our hands as well to climb as our feet, and the vanward being gone up the hill, we must of necessity follow.... It was the hottest piece of service for the time that ever I saw in any place. I was in the rearward, and with me twenty-eight soldiers of mine, whereof were slain eight, and hurt ten. I had with me my drum, whom I caused to sound many alarms, which was well answered by them that was in the rearward, which stayed them from pulling us down by the heels. But I lost divers of my dear friends. They were laid all along the wood as we should pass, behind trees, rocks, crags, bogs, and in covert. Yet so long as we kept the bottom we lost never a man, till we were drawn up the hill by our leaders, where we could observe no order; we could have no sight of them, but were fain only to beat the places where we saw the smoke of our pieces; but the hazard of myself and the loss of my company was the safeguard of many others... were a man never so slightly hurt, he was lost, because no man was able to help him up the hill. Some died, being so out of breath that they were able to go no further, being not hurt at all.’[53]
Defeat of the English.
Carew and Audley had a dispute at the outset, and the loud talk of two usually quiet and modest officers had a very bad effect on their men. The renegade captain, Gerald Fitzmaurice, had full information from Kildare’s people, if not from the Earl himself, and he knew the companies had never been together before. They contained many raw recruits, and he rightly calculated that they would be thrown into confusion by an unseen enemy. The soldiers fresh from England wore red or blue coats, and Maltby, who was with Grey in the open, saw how easily they were picked off. ‘The strangeness of the fight,’ he adds, ‘is such to the new-come ignorant men that at the first brunt they stand all amazed, or rather give back to the enemy.... Their coats stand them in no stead, neither in fashion nor in giving them any succour to their bodies. Let the coat-money be given to some person of credit, with which, and with that which is also bestowed on their hose, they may clothe themselves here with jerkins and hose of frieze, and with the same money bring them every man a mantle which shall serve him for his bedding and thereby shall not be otherwise known to the rebels than the old soldiers be.’ The recruits wavered, the kerne ran away to the enemy, and so ‘the gentlemen were lost.’
Stanley says not above thirty Englishmen were killed, but Moore, Cosby, Audley, and other officers were among them. Grey thought the rebels were fewer than the soldiers, who were stricken by panic. Sir Peter Carew was clad in complete armour, which proved more fatal than even a red coat. Suffocated from running up hill he was forced to lie down and was easily taken. It was proposed to hold him to ransom, ‘but one villain,’ says Hooker, ‘most butcherly, as soon as he was disarmed, with his sword slaughtered and killed him, who in time after was also killed.’
Three months afterwards George Carew rejoiced that he had the good fortune to slay him who slew his brother, and announced that he meant to lay his bones by his or to be ‘thoroughly satisfied with revenge.’ No doubt the survivor under such circumstances would be filled with remorseful bitterness; but his thirst for revenge, fully slaked by a murder three years later, can be scarcely justified even according to that ancient code which prescribes an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.[54]
Consequences of the affair.
When a civilised government receives a check from its revolted subjects, the moral effect is generally out of all proportion to the actual loss. But Pelham had effectually bridled Munster, and Maltby had for the moment nearly neutralised Connaught and Ulster also. O’Rourke and O’Donnell now both took arms in the Catholic cause, and there was every prospect of a general conflagration. Maltby rode post from Dublin northwards, and such was the dread which he had inspired, that O’Donnell at once disbanded his men, and wrote to say that nothing should make him swerve from his allegiance. The President hastened to Leitrim, where he found that O’Rourke had dismantled the castle. He immediately began to repair it, though he had to draw lime eight miles. The tanist Brian O’Rourke, who regarded the chief as his greatest enemy, helped the work, and gladly acted as sheriff under the President.
O’Rourke appeared at the edge of a wood with 1,200 men, of whom 500 were Scots; but Ulick Burke, who begged for the place of honour, charged at the head of 200 soldiers and 500 kerne. Some Scots were killed, and the building was not further interrupted. Leaving a strong garrison in the castle, Maltby then hurried back to Dublin, and arrived there in time to be a witness and a critic of the Glenmalure affair. He warned the English Government that Ulster was in a dangerous state, and that Tirlogh Luineach’s wife was determined to make a new Scotland of that province. ‘She has already planted a good foundation, for she in Tyrone, her daughter in Tyrconnell (being O’Donnell’s wife), and Sorleyboy in Clandeboy, do carry all the sway in the North, and do seek to creep into Connaught, but I will stay them from that.’[55]