“ Shipped for the Barbadoes.” 343 
The great Juggernaut car of an organised Government, backed by 
the lean exchequer of the infant but growing empire, making the 
war feed the war with confiscated colleges, abbeys and estates, and 
supported by the rival clans of Butler and O’Brien, passed over 
the rebel house: and its place knew it no more. One year we see 
Garret Fitzgerald, Earl Palatine of Desmond, bearing sway in all broad 
Munster, an honest but somewhat ineffectual noble, unequal] to the dreadful 
time, his kin of Kildare dividing Leinster with his foe and stepson the Butler 
and making claims even to Lecale in Down where, however, they never dared to 
face the sword of the successorsof Shane O'Neill, who had spurned the 
proffered earldom and who so well knew and taught that Ulster was his and 
should be his, that with the sword he had won it and with the sword he would 
keep it. One year we see Garret Earla ride through the main gate 0 
Shanid or Croom or Youghal or Askeaton or Kilmallock with five hundred 
gentlemen of his name around him, highinhis pitch of pride. John of 
Desmond is there and James of Desmond and James Fitzmaurice (star 
of the Norman chivalry) and the Knight of Kerry and the White 
Knight and the Knight of the Valley and the Seneschal of Imokilly 
and Lord Lansdowne’s much-outlawed ancestor, Fitzmaurice, Baron of 
Lixnaw. The archways sound to the tramp of the chief horses or steeds 
of service. The steel-tipped horsemen’s staves of the duine uasals rise 
like a forest. The forbidden coolun flows in ringlets from inlaid bassinet 
and plumed barret and the felonious c ommeal fringes the lips of the 
rebel Geraldines. We see the Dalgais axes of the galloglass—mail-clad giants 
moving portentously in column. We see the ordered pikes and matchlocks 
of the bonnacht, mercenary troops of ruthless black-haired McSheehys and 
McSwineys, and equally feared red-headed Scots. The rumble of saker and 
ceulverin shakes the walls and deer-footed kerne brandish dart and sgian as 
the street rocks to the greeting slogan of Crom aboo ! 
“ Swiftly sweep the eagles westward, gathering where the carcase lies : 
There’s a blacker cloud behind them : vultures next will rend their 
prize. ” 
A few years pass and we see the enemies of his house close at night 
round a lonely hut in the Kerry hills above Tralee, where they sus- 
pect that Garret lies, a hunted outlaw now. A light is shining and 
they watch from the shadows till the lingering, misty dawn breaks on 
the corpse-strewn Munster dales, and find huddled by a dying fire 
of turf an old, old man, a woman and a boy. “Ye seek Garret, the 
Desmond: strike not: I am he.” But a brutal Irish mercenary strikes 
with the sgian and strikes again, and Elizabeth, the gracious High Queen 
Gloriana in London, in return for that grey, gory head gives her “ subject 
and soldier ” a rich guerdon from the confiscated lands. But the name and 
clan of the smiter and the name and clan of the petty chief who led him are 
still in no high favour after three hundred years in those long-memoried Des- 
mond lands. 
Munster was then planted with English and foreign colonists and the gentle 
Spenser and the less gentle Raleigh hung up their swords and “tuned their 
