fight by his own brother-in-law, O'Conor of Offaly, who took him prisoner and confined him in Carbury castle in Kildare. But when the people of Dublin, with whom he was a great favourite, heard of his imprisonment, a number of active young fellows banded together, and marching all the way to Carbury, about thirty miles off, they rescued the earl and brought him

Carbury Castle. Co. Kildare. From a photograph.

back in triumph to Dublin. This is a bright part of the picture; but there is a sad and dark side also, where we see how the ruin of the great earl was brought about. It seems he had imprudently let fall some words disrespectful to the queen, who, when the matter was reported to her, had John Tiptoft-"the butcher," as he was called, from his cruelty-sent to Ireland to replace him in the deputyship. Acting on the secret instructions of the queen, this new deputy caused the two earls of Kildare and Desmond to be arrested for

exacting coyne and livery, and for making alliance with the Irish, contrary to the Statute of Kilkenny (pp. 167, 168). Desmond was at once executed (1467), while Kildare was pardoned; and "the butcher" returned to England, where he was himself executed soon after.

-from

To the people of the Pale, the Irish were a constant source of terror; and when they failed to crush them in open fight they sometimes attempted to do so by act of parliament. One of these acts, passed by the Irish parliament in 1465, ordained that every Irishman dwelling in the Pale was to dress and shave like the English, and to take an English surname :— some town as Trim, Sutton, Cork; or of a colour as Black, Brown; or of some calling, as Smith, Carpenter, etc., on pain of forfeiture of his goods. Then began the custom of changing Irish surnames to English forms, which afterwards became very general. Another and more mischievous measure forbade ships from fishing in the seas of Irish countries (that is, those parts of Ireland still belonging to the native chiefs) because the dues went to make the Irish people prosperous and strong. But the worst enactment of all was one providing that it was lawful to decapitate thieves found robbing "or going or coming anywhere" unless they had an Englishman in their company; and whoever did so, on bringing the head to the mayor of the nearest town, was licensed to levy a good sum off the barony. This put it in the power of any evil-minded person to kill the first Irishman he met, pretending he was a thief, and to raise money on his head. The legislators indeed had no such evil intention: for the act was merely a desperate attempt to keep down marauders who swarmed at this time everywhere through the Pale: but all the same it was a very wrong and dangerous law.

From Petrie's "Round Towers."

CHAPTER XXVI.

POYNINGS' LAW.

A. D. 1485-1494.-Henry VII.

Y the accession, in 1485, of Henry VII., who belonged to the Lancastrians, that great party finally triumphed. The Tudors, of whom he was the first, were a strong-minded and astute race of sovereigns. They paid

more attention to Irish affairs than their

predecessors had done; and they ultimately succeeded in recovering all that had been lost by neglect and mismanagement, and in restoring the English power in Ireland. At this time all the chief state offices in Ireland were held by the Geraldines; but as the new king felt that he could not govern the country without their aid, he made no changes, though he knew well they were all devoted Yorkists. He had a very insecure hold on his own throne, and he thought that the less he disturbed matters in Ireland the better. Accordingly the great earl of Kildare, who had been lord deputy for several years, with a short break, was still kept on.

But the Irish retained their affection for the house of York; and when the young impostor Lambert Simnel came to Ireland and gave out that he was the Yorkist

prince Edward earl of Warwick, he was received with open arms, not only by the deputy, but by almost all the Anglo-Irish :-nobles, clergy, and people. But the city of Waterford rejected him and remained steadfast in its loyalty; whence it got the name of Urbs Intacta, the "untarnished city." After a little time an army of 2000 Germans came to Ireland to support the impostor; and in 1487 he was actually crowned as Edward IV., by the bishop of Meath, in Christchurch Cathedral, Dublin, in presence of the deputy Kildare, who was the chief instigator and manager of the whole affair, the archbishop of Dublin, and a great concourse

of Anglo-Irish nobles, ecclesiastics, and A.D. 1487 officers, all of whom renounced their allegiance to Henry VII. In order that he might be seen well by the people, he was borne through the streets on the shoulders of a gigantic Anglo-Irishman named Darcy, amidst the loud huzzas of the Dublin mob: an incident that gives us a view of the rough and ready methods of those times.

But this foolish business came to a sudden termination when Simnel was defeated and taken prisoner in England. Then Kildare and the others humbly sent to ask pardon of the king; who, dreading their power if they were driven to rebellion, took no severer steps than to send over Sir Richard Edgecomb to exact new oaths of allegiance; retaining Kildare as deputy. In the following year the king invited them to a banquet at Greenwich; and they must have felt greatly crestfallen and humiliated when they saw that one of the waiters who attended them at table was none other than their idolised prince Lambert Simnel. How heartily the king must have enjoyed it: for he loved a good joke.

A little later on, reports of new plots in Ireland

reached the king's ears; whereupon in 1492 he removed Kildare from the office of deputy. These reports were

not without foundation, for now a second claimant for the crown, a young Fleming named Perkin Warbeck, landed in Cork in 1492 and announced that he was Richard duke of York, one of the two princes that had been kept in prison by Richard III. After the ridiculous termination of the Simnel imposture one would think it hard for another to gain a footing in Ireland; yet Warbeck was at once accepted by the citizens of Cork; but his career, which belongs to English rather than to Irish history, need not be followed up here. It is enough to say that after causing considerable disturbance in Ireland, he was at length taken and hanged at Tyburn, along with John Walter mayor of Cork, his chief supporter in that city. It was mainly the English colonists who were concerned in the episodes of Simnel and Warbeck; the native Irish took little or no interest in either claimant.

The Irish parliament was always under the control of a few great lords, who could have any acts they pleased passed in it, so that it gave them great power, and its laws were often hasty, harsh, and oppressive, and sometimes dangerous to the king's sovereignty. Henry knew all this; and the experience of Simnel and Warbeck taught him that his Anglo-Irish subjects might, at any favourable opportunity, again rise in rebellion for the house of York. He came to the resolution to lessen the power of the nobles by destroying the independence of their parliament; and having given Sir Edward Poynings instructions to this effect, he sent him over as deputy. Poynings' first proceeding was to lead an expedition to the north against O'Hanlon and Magennis, who had given shelter to some of