O'Neill, not only for years beat her Generals in the field, he beat herself and her councillors at their own game. To Essex, in an ecstacy of rage at the loss of the last great army sent, she wrote (September 17th, 1599): "To trust this traitor upon oath is to trust the devil upon his religion. Only this we are sure (for we see it in effect), that you have prospered so ill for us by your warfare, as we cannot but be very jealous lest we should be as well overtaken by the treaty."
(Essex wished to bring O'Neill in by a treaty which, while ostensibly conceding the terms of the Irish Prince, was to allow the Queen time to carry out her purpose.)
The Irish Princes knew Elizabeth and her Ministers, as well as she read Essex. "Believe no news from England of any agreement in this country," they had written to Phillip II in 1597, "great offers have been made by the Queen of England, but we will not break our oath and promise to you.'" In a letter written a year earlier (October 16th, 1596), replying by the special envoy sent by the King, they said: "Since the former envoys left us we have used every means in our power, as we promised we should do, to gain time and procrastination from one day to another. * * * But how could we impose on so clever an enemy, so skilled in every kind of cunning and cheating if we did not use much dissimulation, and especially if we did not pretend we were anxious for peace? We will keep firm and unshaken the promises which we made to Your Majesty with our last breath; if we do not we shall incur at once the wrath of God and the contempt of men."
How faithfully they kept those promises and how the Spanish King failed in his, their fate and the bitter ruin of their country shows. That men fighting for Ireland, had to meet Elizabeth and her statesmen with something
