Page:Roger Casement - The crime against Ireland and how the war may right it.djvu/73

Rh for its loyalty to the Crown, had four centuries of Irish chivalry in his veins. His reply is on record, and as a warrant of Irish honor, it stands beside Burghley's warrant to his English poisoner. "The clause in the Queen's letter seems most strange to me. I will never use treachery to any, for it will both touch Her Highness's honor too much, and mine own credit; and whosoever gave the Queen advice thus to write to me is fitter to execute such base services than I am." The Irish blood will out—even in a butler.

To Carew, the President of Munster, Cecil wrote enjoining the assassination of the young Earl of Desmond, then "in the keeping of Carew": "Whatever you do to abridge him out of Providence shall never be imputed to you for a fault, but exceedingly commended by the Queen." After this, we are not surprised to learn that in her instructions to Mountjoy, the successor of Essex, the Queen "recommended to his special care to preserve the true exercise of religion among her loving subjects." As O'Neill was still in the field with a large army, she prudently pointed out, however, that the time "did not permit that he should intermeddle by any severity or violence in matters of religion until her power was better established there to countenounce his action." That the character of their adversary was faithfully appreciated by contemporary Irish opinion stands plain in a letter written by James Fitzthomas, nephew of the Great Earl Gerald of Desmond, to Phillip II. "The government of the English is such as Pharaoh himself never used the like; for they content not themselves with all temporal prosperity, but by cruelty desire our blood and perpetual destruction, to blot out the whole remembrance of our posterity * * * for that Nero, in his time, was far inferior to that Queen in cruelty."

The Irish chiefs well sustained their part in meeting this combination of power and perfidy, and merited, on Rh