Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 7.djvu/598

 578 REIGN OF ELIZABETH. [CH. 46 Shan, who was perhaps drunk, heard the words and forgetting where he was, flung back the lie in Gil- lespie's throat. Gillespie sprung to his feet, ran out of the tent, and raised the slogan of the Isles. A hundred dirks flashed into the moonlight, and the Irish wher- ever they could be found were struck down and stabbed. Some two or three found their horses and escaped ; all the rest were murdered ; and Shan himself, gashed with fifty wounds, was ' wrapped in a kern's old shirt ' and flung into a pit dug hastily among the ruined arches of Glenarm. Even there what was left of him was not allowed to rest ; four days later Piers, the captain of Knockfergus, hacked the head from the body, and carried it on a spear's point through Drogheda to Dublin, where staked upon a spike it bleached on the battlements of the castle, a symbol to the Irish world of the fate of Celtic heroes. 1 So died Shan O'Neil, one of those champions of Irish nationality, who under varying features have repeated themselves in the history of that country with periodic regularity. At once a drunken ruffian and a keen and fiery patriot, the representative in his birth of the line of the ancient kings, the ideal in his character of all which Irishmen most admired, regardless in his actions of the laws of God and man, yet the devoted subject in his creed of the Holy Catholic Church ; with an eye 1 Sir William Fitzwilliam to Cecil, June 10 : Irish MSS. Soils House.