I559-] SHAN O 1 NEIL. Meath flocked by hundreds over the northern border, and took refuge with O'Neil. 1 Sir Edward Bellingham in 1549, by firmness of hand and integrity of heart, had made the English name re- spected from the Giant's Causeway to Yalentia. Could Bellingham have lived a few years longer could Somerset or Northumberland or Mary, so zealous each in their way for * the glory of God/ have remembered that without common sense and common honesty at the bottom of them, creeds and systems are as houses built on quicksands the order which had taken root might have grown strong under the shadow of justice, and Ireland might have had a happier future. But this was not to be. The labour and expense of a quarter of a century was thrown idly away. The Irish army, since the rebellion of Lord Thomas Fitz- gerald, had cost thirteen or fourteen hundred thousand pounds, yet the Pale was shortened and its revenues decreased ; the moral ruin was more complete than the 1 After six years of discipline and improvement, Sir Henry Sidney described the state of the four shires, the Irish inhabitants, and the Eng- lish garrison, in the following lan- guage : 'The English Pale is over- whelmed with vagabonds stealth and spoil daily carried out of it ; the people miserable not two gentlemen in the whole of it able to lend twenty pounds. They have neither horse nor armour, nor apparel nor victual. The soldiers be so beggar- like as it would abhor a general to look on them ; yet so insolent as to be intolerable to the people, so rooted in idleness as there is no hope by correction to amend them, yet so allied with the Irish I dare not trust them in a fort or in any dangerous service. They have all an Irish w e or two never a married wife among them ; so that all is known that we intend to do here.' Sidney to Leicester, March 5, 1556 : Irish MSS. Bolls House.
