Preparations for the settlement of Munster, and speculations as to the coming of the Armada, occupied the early days of 1586. A rover, who put into Cork Harbour, declared that 20,000 Spaniards were intended for Ireland. Redmond O’Gallagher, whom the Pope had provided to the See of Derry, and whom the Queen had not sought to displace, was once more on his travels in search of aid from France or Spain, and Munster lay open to attack. There was no garrison even at Limerick, which was called the strongest place in the province, and the guns had fallen to the ground from their rotten carriages. The muskets were useless from rust, and the feathers had damped off the arrows. Cork, Waterford, and the rest were in no better case. Wallop had to pledge his plate for 100l., and the captains were in debt through vain attempts to clothe their shivering men, who ran off to the Irish chiefs to look for brogues and frieze mantles. The Vice-Treasurer anxiously begged for 20,000l.; if the Spaniards landed it would cost 300,000l. to get rid of them. But Elizabeth’s thoughts were all given to the Continent, and better than any man in Ireland she probably understood the real impotence of Spain.[145]
Parliament—the Desmond attainder.
Parliament dissolved.
In the second session of Perrott’s Parliament the chief business was the Desmond attainder, and there was so much opposition that some of the judges were sent for to assure the House of Commons that Ormonde’s rights should be saved. In the bill which then passed, Desmond and his brothers John and James, James Fitzmaurice, and thirty-four others were named, their lands being vested in the Crown without inquisition, but without prejudice to innocent parties. Eighty-two others were attainted by name in another Act, which contained the same reservations. Some of the late Opposition had apologised, but an Opposition still remained, and Perrott was not allowed to punish it as he wished. The Commons rejected a bill vesting the lands of persons thereafter attainted in the Crown without the usual formalities, and they finally refused to grant a subsidy of 13s. 4d. upon every ploughland. The session lasted less than three weeks. At the dissolution Speaker Walshe addressed the Lord Deputy at length, praising the constitution, lamenting that the Queen was an absentee, and hinting pretty plainly that the subject was overburdened. ‘Lamps,’ he said, ‘cannot give light that are not maintained with oil.’ Perrott’s answer, if he gave one, is not recorded; but Elizabeth was so little pleased with her Parliament of Ireland, that she summoned no other during the remaining sixteen years of her reign.[146]
The MacDonnells in Antrim.
Sorley Boy becomes a subject,
and a great landowner.
Perrott’s last invasion of Ulster, and his correspondence with the King of Scotland, had done little good. Dunluce was now in Sorley Boy’s hands, and the English Government inclined to make friends with him. Sorley hesitated to go to Dublin, and in the meantime his eldest son Alaster was killed in Tyrconnell. After being wounded in a skirmish he swam across a river, but we found him, says Captain Price, ‘by great chance in a deep grave, strewn over with rushes, and on every side six old calliox weeping... but a quick corse therein, and in memory of Dunluce we cried quittance with him, and sent his head to be set on Dublin Castle.’ Perrott was inclined to make the most of success, and to break off the negotiations, ‘as though,’ said Fenton, ‘by this blow hydra’s head were seared up.’ But his loss made the old chief readier to treat, and he came to Dublin on protection, after writing a humble letter. It is said that an official brutally showed him his son’s head over the Castle gate, and that he proudly answered, as if to justify Fenton’s simile, ‘my son has many heads.’ He made a formal submission, prostrating himself before a portrait of Queen Elizabeth, admitting that he had no legal right in Ulster, and particularly condemning his own folly ‘in leaving such men in the Castle of Dunluce, within this her Highness’s land, as should say they kept it in the name, or to the use of, the King of Scots, a Prince that honoureth her Majesty and embraceth her favour.’ The land he held had been taken by force, and he was willing to keep it on such terms as the Queen might be pleased to grant. Upon this basis a treaty was concluded, by which Sorley had a grant by knight service of all the land between the Bann and the Bush, and of much to the eastward, and he was made Constable of Dunluce, while resigning his claim to property in it. He became a denizen, and having got all that he had fought for, gave Perrott no further trouble. A great part of the Glynns, comprising the coast between Larne and Ballycastle, had already been granted to his nephew Angus. Thus were the MacDonnells confirmed in the possessions for which they had struggled so long.[147]
Bingham in Connaught.
The Mayo Burkes rebel,