At last the long game of hide-and-seek was brought to an end by Sir James offering to submit, to which Perrot agreeing, he took the required oaths in the church of Kilmallock, the scene of his former ravages, and kissed the president’s sword in token of his regret for “the said most mischievous part.”  This farce gravely gone through, he sailed for France, and Munster for a while was at peace.  It was only a temporary lull though.  The Desmond power was still too towering to be left alone, and both its defenders and the Government knew that they were merely indulging in a little breathing time before the final struggle.

XXVI.

THE DESMOND REBELLION.

The tale of the great Desmond rebellion which ended only with the ruin of that house, and with the slaughter or starvation of thousands of its unhappy adherents, is one of those abortive tragedies of which the whole history of Ireland is full.  Our pity for the victims’ doom, and our indignation for the cold-blooded cruelty with which that doom was carried out, is mingled with a reluctant realization of the fact that the state of things which preceded it was practically impossible, that it had become an anomaly, and that as such it was bound either to change or to perish.

[Illustration:  CAHIR CASTLE, TIPPERARY, TAKEN BY THE EARL OF ESSEX IN 1599. (From the “Pacata Hibernia.")]

From the twelfth century onwards, the Desmond Geraldines had been lords, as has been seen, of a vast tract of Ireland, covering the greater part of Munster.  Earlier and perhaps more completely than any of the other great Norman houses, they had become Irish chieftains rather than English subjects, and the opening of Elizabeth’s reign found them still what for centuries past they had been, and with their power, within their own limits, little if at all curtailed.  The Desmond of the day had still his own judges or Brehons, by whose judgment he professed to rule.  He had still his own palatinate courts; he still collected his dues by force, driving away his clansmen’s cattle, and distraining those who resisted him.  Only a few years before this time, during an expedition of the kind, he and Ormond had encountered one another in the open field at Affane, upon the Southern Blackwater, each side flying their banners, and shouting their war cries as if no queen’s representative had ever been seen or heard of.

Such a state of things, it was plain, could not go on indefinitely, would not indeed have gone on as long but for the confusion and disorder in which the country had always been plunged, and especially the want of all settled communication.  The palatinate of Ormond, it is true, was theoretically in much the same state, but then Ormond was a keener sighted and a wiser man than Desmond, and knew when the times demanded redress.  He had of late even made some effort to abolish the abominable system of “coyne and livery,” although, as he himself frankly admits, he was forced to impose it again in another form not long afterwards.