The O’Flaherties.
Fitzwilliam refused to let Bingham confront his accusers at Galway, lest the terror of his presence should silence them. The result was that their uncontradicted statements were sent over to England, and Walsingham’s wrath was hot within him. The unfairness of the procedure was evident, the reason for it much less so. ‘It may fall out, my Lord Deputy, to be your own case, for it is no new thing in that realm to have deputies accused.’ Considering Walsingham’s evident prejudice against him, Fitzwilliam suggested that the Queen should give him a successor. The trial of the case was removed to Dublin; and the Lord Deputy foretold that no Connaught chief would go there to accuse Bingham. If fear did not prevent such a journey, poverty would. And so it turned out. Much was proved against inferior officers, and there can be no doubt that the Governor of Connaught was apt to shield useful underlings under almost any circumstances. That he was guilty of extreme severity, and that he executed children who were retained as hostages, is probably true. But he managed the province well, and got a large revenue out of it. And it is certain that he had friends among the Irish as well as enemies. Among these was Roger O’Flaherty, grandfather of the author of Ogygia. This Roger owned the castle and lands of Moycullen, and had long complained of Sir Murrogh’s usurpations. It seems that he was satisfied, for he wrote strongly in the Governor’s favour, who also befriended him with the English Government. Sir Murrogh was an enterprising man, and never made the impossible attempt to prove his title to land. ‘Why, man,’ he told his own counsel, ‘I got it by the sword; what title should I say else?’ Bingham was an absolute ruler. Opposition he checked ruthlessly, and he cared little for constitutional forms. He took no pains to conciliate anyone, and was of course accused of provoking men to rebel. Nor did he care to disguise his opinion that many of the Irish ought to be rooted out. Perhaps the worst charge against him is that made by Fitzwilliam, who called him an atheist, ‘for that he careth not what he doeth, nor to say anything how untrue soever, so it may serve his turn.’[199]
Bingham and Bishop Jones.
Fitzwilliam and Jones acknowledged that William Burke, the Blind Abbot, was a fool, and on the whole the person who suffered most from the inquiry into Bingham’s conduct was the Bishop of Meath. Sir Richard said his lordship blamed intemperate language, while he himself exclaimed at cards, ‘God’s wounds! play the ten of hearts.’ He was so busy preparing a case against him that he found no time to preach once during the three weeks that he spent at Galway, though he would go to church in the morning to hear an exercise and again in the afternoon to hear a play. He was superseded in the Connaught commission, and Walsingham rebuked him for not attending to his own proper duties. The Bishop’s apology was almost abject, and he promised to give up temporal business. He had, he said, not neglected his own diocese, though thinking it unnecessary to preach in Dublin more than once a term. Fitzwilliam defended him, and he was employed again during Walsingham’s life, but not in business connected with Connaught. Loftus, whose wife’s sister he had married, considered him as one of his own family, and urged that the Papists had taken great advantage of the Bishop’s disgrace.[200]
Sir Brian O’Rourke.
The composition in Connaught had been favourable to the power of Sir Brian O’Rourke, the chief of Leitrim. Nominally, his jurisdiction over the people of his country was restrained; but so large a share of land was given to him absolutely that he found himself stronger than ever, and refused to acknowledge the Governor of Connaught, maintaining that he was under no man except the Lord Deputy himself. In the original scheme for shireing Leitrim made in 1583 a considerable part of Fermanagh was included, but the arrangement did not hold for the purposes of the composition agreed upon two years later. O’Rourke’s country, as then defined, is contained within the modern county of Leitrim. Its contents were roughly estimated at some 75,000 acres. Of this nominal area more than 8,000 acres were allowed to O’Rourke in demesne. Out of about 50,000 more he was permitted to receive a rent of 300l. a year, and the rest he was to hold by three knights’ fees. The smaller freeholders were required to pay ten shillings a year out of each quarter of 120 acres, and to supply eight horsemen and forty footmen on general hostings. Old MacMurry, one of these subordinate chiefs, wept with joy and blessed the good Queen. ‘We have,’ he said, ‘heretofore paid O’Rourke better than ten marks, or a quarter; and shall we indeed escape now for a trifle of twenty shillings!’ But O’Rourke refused to pay his rent to Bingham, and was friendly to the intruding Scots. After their overthrow at Ardnaree it was no longer possible to despise the Governor, but O’Rourke persuaded Perrott to remit part of what he owed, and it was not until after that Deputy’s departure that Bingham found himself really master. When the Spaniards came, Sir Brian did what he could to help them, and his rent was soon again in arrear. The King of Spain sent a friar with letters of thanks for his services to the Armada, and early in 1589 he was reported to be in open rebellion, and to be acting under the secret advice of Tyrone. His sons and brothers, with more than 400 men, swept the northern part of Sligo to the Moy, and drove off 3,000 cows and 1,000 mares. O’Rourke kept so many armed men among the bogs and hills of Leitrim that it was said he could not feed them without spoiling a neighbouring county.[201]
O’Rourke defies the Queen.
O’Rourke had struggled hard to prevent a sheriff from being established in his country, and it was natural that he should wish to retain his autonomy. But his unwillingness to obey any authority lay much deeper than any mere dislike to Sir Richard Bingham. About a month after the slaughter of the Scots at Ardnaree in 1586 the Serjeant-at-arms for Connaught saw a wooden figure of a woman set on wheels near MacClancy’s house on Lough Melvin. The bystanders told him it was meant for a hag who lived over the water, and who had denied a carpenter milk. This seems to have been the same effigy as that on which O’Rourke caused the words ‘Queen Elizabeth’ to be written, and upon which he showered abuse, while the gallowglasses hacked it with their axes. A halter was placed round the neck of the mutilated figure, and it was then dragged through the dirt by horses. This was an incident in the Christmas festivities which Sir Brian kept ‘according the Romish and Popish computation’—that is the Gregorian calendar—and he took the opportunity of announcing that her Majesty was ‘the mother and nurse of all heresies and heretics.’ Bingham did not hear of the matter until after his return from the Low Countries; but it was reported to Perrott, and his refusal to order O’Rourke’s arrest was brought against him at his trial.[202]
Fitzwilliam gives Bingham his way.
Sir Brian O’Rourke was lawfully married to Lady Mary Burke, and her only son Teig had a grant of the family estates in the next reign. But he had an elder son by the wife of John O’Crean, a merchant of Sligo, and it was to him that the chiefry was likely to fall. The work of chastising O’Rourke was entrusted by Bingham to Clanricarde, and it seems to have been a labour of love, either because the Earl resented wrongs done to his sister, or because he hated her former misdeeds, or because he felt that his nephew’s case had some resemblance to what his own had been. With thirty horsemen and some kerne of his own, and two regular companies, he set out from Elphin and marched to Ballinafad, where news came that O’Rourke was at his house near Lough Gill. Clanricarde asked Captain Mordaunt if his soldiers could go another fourteen miles the same night, and was told that they would do their best. The daylight overtook them at some distance from O’Rourke’s house, and they had to fight after their long night’s march. The O’Rourkes fell back into a bog, and Clanricarde insisted on following them with his horse. He was dismounted, and a spur torn from his heel. The bullets flew thickly about him, and Mordaunt’s men came up only just in time, his gallantry exciting the admiration of the English officers. O’Rourke was never able to make head again, but he probably fancied himself safe in his own country. When the Lord Deputy held sessions at Sligo a few months later, he refused to attend, on the ground that the Binghams had something to do with them. The result was that Fitzwilliam accepted Bingham’s policy as against O’Rourke, though he was always ready, and often with very good reason, to testify against the Governor’s harshness and against the tyranny of his brothers, cousins, and followers.[203]