honour.  Lowering looks however were bent upon him from every side of the table.  Captain Pierce, an English officer, had been busy the day before stirring up the smouldering embers of anger.  Suddenly a taunt was flung out by one of the guests at the discomfited hero.  Shane—­forgetting perhaps where he was—­sprang up to revenge it.  A dozen swords and skeans blazed out upon him, and he fell, pierced by three or four of his entertainers at once.  His body was then tossed into an old ruined chapel hard by, where the next day his head was hacked off by Captain Pierce, and carried to Sidney, who sent it to be spiked upon Dublin Castle.  It was but too characteristic an end of an eminently characteristic career.

[Illustration:  ST. PATRICK’S BELL.]

XXV.

BETWEEN TWO STORMS.

By 1566 Sir Henry Sidney became Lord-deputy, not now in the room of another, but fully appointed.  With the possible exception of Sir John Perrot, he was certainly the ablest of all the viceroys to whom Elizabeth committed power in Ireland.  Unlike others he had the advantage, too, of having served first in the country in subordinate capacities, and so earning his experience.  He even seems to have been fairly popular, which, considering the nature of some of his proceedings, throws a somewhat sinister light, it must be owned, upon those of his successors and predecessors.

After the death and defeat of Shane the Proud a lull took place, and the new deputy took the opportunity of making a progress through the south and west of the island, which he reports to be all terribly wasted by war.  Many districts, he says, “had but one-twentieth part of their former population.”  Galway, worn out by incessant attacks, could scarcely defend her walls.  Athenry had but four respectable householders left, who “sadly presenting the rusty keys of their once famous town, confessed themselves unable to defend it.”

[Illustration:  SIR HENRY SIDNEY, LORD-DEPUTY FROM 1565 TO 1587. (From an engraving by Harding.)]

Sidney was one of the first to relinquish what had hitherto been the favourite and traditional policy of all English governors, that, namely, of playing one great lord or chieftain against another, and to attempt the larger task of putting down and punishing all signs of insubordination especially in the great.  In this respect he was the political parent of Strafford, who acted the same part sixty years later.  He had not—­any more than his great successor—­to reproach himself either with feebleness in the execution of his policy.  The number of military executions that mark his progress seem to have startled his own coadjutors, and even to have evoked some slight remonstrance from Elizabeth herself.  “Down they go at every corner!” the Lord-deputy writes at this time triumphantly in an account of his own proceedings, “and down, God willing, they shall go.”