Page:Roger Casement - The crime against Ireland and how the war may right it.djvu/72

66 of her own cunning is made very clear to anyone reading the English State papers in Ireland.

Essex, in one of his "answers," wrote: "I advise Her Majesty to allow me, at my return to Dublin, to conclude this treaty, yealding some of their grants in the present: and when Her Majesty has made secret preparations to enable me to prosecute, I will find quarrels enough to break and give them a deadly blow."

The Irish, however, failed in this contest. They were not sufficiently good liars, and lacked the higher flights of villainy necessary to sustain the encounter. The essential English in Tudor days, and much later, for administering a deadly blow to an Irish patriot was "assassination." Poison frequently took the place of the knife, and was often administered wrapt in a leaf of the British Bible. A certain Atkinson, knowing the religious nature of Cecil, the Queen's Prime Minister, the founder of a long line of statesmen foremost as champions of Church and Book, suggested the getting rid of O'Neill by some "poisoned hosts." This proposal to use the Blessed Sacrament as a veritable Last Supper for the last great Irish chief remains on record, endorsed by Cecil.

Another Briton, named Annyas, was charged to poison "the most dangerous and open rebel in Minister," Florence MacCarthy More, the great MacCarthy. Elizabeth's Prime Minister piously endorsed the deed—"though his soul never had the thought to consent to the poisoning of a dog, much less a Christian."

The fundamental characteristics of the two peoples, English and Irish, were perhaps never more sharply brought into contrast than in some of these measures adopted by an English Queen and her Ministers to get rid of an Irish enemy. The Earl of Ormonde, the Queen suggested, might aid one of her projects for getting rid of Shane O'Neill. Ormonde, although the head of an Anglo-Irish house,