Tyrone was the very antipodes of Shane, the last great O’Neill leader.  He was much more, in fact, of an English politician and courtier than an Irish chieftain.  He had served in the English army; had fought with credit under Grey in Munster, and was intimately acquainted with all the leading Englishmen of the day.  Even his religion, unlike that of most Irish Catholics of the day, seems to have sat but lightly upon him.  Captain Lee, an English officer, quartered in Ulster, in a very interesting letter to the queen written about this time, assures her confidentially that, although a Roman Catholic, he “is less dangerously or hurtfully so than some of the greatest in the English Pale,” for that when he accompanied the Lord-deputy to church “he will stay and hear a sermon;” whereas they “when they have reached the church door depart as if they were wild cats.”  He adds, as a further recommendation, that by way of domestic chaplain he has at present but “one little cub of an English priest.”  Lord Essex in still plainer terms told Tyrone himself when he was posing as the champion of Catholicism:  “Dost thou talk of a free exercise of religion!  Why thou carest as little for religion as my horse.”

Such a man was little likely to rush blindly into a rebellion in which he had much to lose and little to gain.  He knew, as few Irishmen knew, the strength of England.  He knew something also of Spain, and of what had come of trusting for help in that direction.  Hitherto, therefore, his influence had been steadily thrown upon the side of order.  He had more than once assisted the deputy to put down risings in the north, and, on the whole, had borne his part loyally as a dutiful subject of the queen.

Now, however, he had come to a point where the ways branched.  He had to choose his future course, and there were many causes pushing him all but irresistibly into an attitude of rebellion.  One of these was the arbitrary arrest of his brother-in-law Hugh O’Donnell, called Red Hugh, who had been induced to come on board a Government vessel by means of a friendly invitation, and had been then and there seized, flung under hatches, and carried off as a hostage to Dublin Castle, from which, after years of imprisonment, he had managed to escape by stealth in the dead of winter, and arrived half dead of cold and exposure in his own country, where his treatment had aroused the bitterest and most implacable hostility in the breast of all the clan.  A more directly personal affair, and the one that probably more than any other single cause pushed Tyrone over the frontiers of rebellion, was the following.  Upon the death of his wife he had fallen in love with Bagnall, the Lord-Marshall’s, sister, and had asked for her hand.  This Bagnall, for some reason, refused, whereupon Tyrone, having already won the lady’s heart, carried her off, and they were married, an act which the marshall never forgave.