“ Shipped for the Barbadoes.” 349 
of the older lords above the rushing Roe, once a mighty stronghold, then a 
shattered ruin. A few rooms were partly habitable and in one an aged crone, 
wrapped in a blanket, crouched over the reek of a peat fire which filled the miser- 
able room with smoke. Struck with so much wretchedness the duchess asked 
her name. The gaunt hag drew herself up to her full height and replied : 
“T am O’Cahan’s wife.” 
O‘Cahan had rotted in the Tower, Among his fellow captives were Nail 
Garbh O’Donnell and Nachtan the latter’s son, once of Trinity College, Dublin, 
but too capable to leave unchained. They had been removed thither from 
Dublin Castle, from which they had made many desperate escapes. 
Standish O’Grady relates that no prison in Tyrone could hold Hugh of the 
Fetters, son of Shanee O’Neill. No prison in Ireland could hold that tameless 
Tirconnallian house. One of Hugh Roe O’Donnell’s urraghts, Sir Cahir 
O’Dogherty, who had abandoned his chief and adhered to the Queen 
was driven to revolt and the Lord Deputy Chichester seized for himself his 
territory of Inishowen when the rash youth died in his last fight at the 
Rock of Doon. (Chichester’s descendants are still Marquesses of Donegal 
but the older and more enduring stock has again ‘the lands, the ports, the 
fruitful harbours and the fishful bays *’ of that wild northern land.) So passed 
the Ulster septs which cleaved to the Crown. Of the Ulster rebels one family 
the Macdonnels of the Glynns survived as Earls and Marquesses of 
Antrim through the sympathy of the Scottish Stuarts for their High- 
land origin and a somewhat un-Ultonian suppleness. Sorley Boy was right: 
when the government showed him the bloody head of hisson Alister, the fierce 
lord of Dunluce laughed : “‘ My son”’ he said, “* has many heads.”’ 
Other confiscations followed. Each new deputy planned new seizures. 
Most of Wicklow and Wexford was torn from the O’Byrnes and 
Kayanaghs. A slice of them was given to one George Castriot De Rinzy, an 
Albanian, but the family of our genial Inspector General has ceased to be 
exotic. Longford was taken from the O’Farrels. When Strafford deserted 
the cause of parliamentary agitation and came in 1632 as Lord Deputy he 
designed to make the Government self-supporting and incidentally to create an 
army and a supply of money for King Charles I. then out of suits with parlia- 
mentary methods. So far the King had never been the better for Ireland. 
Strafford confiscated Connaught and other districts under trivial pre- 
texts or none at all. He did many other things in Ireland which 
I am glad to say eventually cost him his head. The English, who are rich 
and prosperous enough to be, as regards hero worship, the most fickle and 
sentimental people in the world, are suffering from a re-action in his 
favour, being rather surfeited by the enthusiasm of over-strenuous ad- 
mirers of Cromwell’s heroic methods. The Irish,the least sentimental of 
peoplesand whom he used petty knavery to plunder, merely regard 
Black Tom Wentworth as a paler cavalier edition of the later sanguin- 
ary quack. Their opinion has not changed in two hundred and fifty years. 
Religious persecution had accompanied the confiscations and when 
the Catholics started fresh colleges and educational endowments to 
