Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 42.djvu/202

Rh welcomed by a large concourse of ecclesiastics and others. The pope granted them an audience on the following day, and assigned to Tyrone a monthly pension of a hundred crowns, a house (called the Borgo Vecchio) rent free, together with an allowance of bread and wine for ten persons; the king of Spain added four hundred ducats a month. Rory O'Donnell, earl of Tyrconnel, died in June 1608, and in December 1613 Tyrone, who by that time was probably fully convinced of his folly in leaving Ireland, made overtures through the Earl of Somerset for his restoration. But his overtures met with no response from the government, which was engaged in perfecting the plantation of Ulster, to which in the following year the Irish parliament gave its sanction by passing an act of outlawry and attainder against the fugitives. Tyrone talked of recovering his inheritance by force of arms, and lived in hope of seeing and profiting by a rupture between England and Spain. But the government contented itself with watching his movements and taking such steps as were necessary to frustrate his designs. He was seized with a settled melancholy. His eyesight failed him at the beginning of 1616, and later in the year he was prostrated by frequent attacks of intermittent fever, to which he eventually succumbed on 20 July. He is said to have been buried with great pomp and ceremony between his eldest son and the Earl of Tyrconnel in the church of San Pietro di Montorio. The absence of any memorial slab, and the existence of several copies (Egerton MSS. 127 [39], 155 [60], 174 [8]) of a poem by an anonymous author on seeing his skull, beginning ‘O Man that gazest on the bone,’ lead irresistibly to the conclusion that his remains were subsequently removed, but to what final resting-place is not known.

Tyrone's first wife was a daughter of Sir Brian MacPhelim O'Neill, lord of Clandeboye, whom he divorced, and who subsequently married Niall MacBrian Faghartach O'Neill. His second wife, the daughter of Hugh MacManus O'Donnell, died in 1591. By her he had Hugh, called the baron of Dungannon, who died in Rome in September 1608, and was buried in San Pietro di Montorio; Henry, a colonel of an Irish regiment in the archduke's army, who died about 1626; Ursula, said to have been married to Sir Nicholas Bagenal, and two other daughters—one married to Magennis, and the other to Richard Butler, viscount Mountgarret. The circumstances of his marriage with his third wife, Mabel, the daughter of Sir Nicholas Bagenal, have already been recounted. His fourth wife was a daughter of Sir Hugh Magennis of Iveagh. She accompanied him in his flight, and is believed to have died at Louvain in 1607. She was the mother of Shane Niall or John O'Neill, who entered the Spanish army, was called ‘El conde de Tyrone,’ and was killed in Catalonia in 1641; Con Brian, who either was murdered or committed suicide at Brussels on 16 Aug. 1617; and several daughters, one of whom married Sir Randal MacDonnell, first earl of Antrim [q. v.], and another Hugh Roe O'Donnell. It is probable Tyrone married a fifth time, for mention is made of a young countess of Tyrone during his residence in Rome. He had, in addition, numerous illegitimate children, of whom one, Con, who was left behind at the time of the flight, was educated at Eton as a protestant, and died apparently about 1622 in the Tower.

Two portraits of Tyrone—one in armour, and the other made in his decrepitude at Rome—belonged in 1866 to Mr. C. de Gernon (Cat. First Exhibition of National Portraits, Nos. 375, 378). A portrait forms the frontispiece to C. P. Meehan's ‘Life and Fortunes of the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnel.’ 