Ormond, too, was "to be bridled." It was said his house was in no mood to hand over the "rule and obedience" of south Ireland to the king. At a feast at Ely House in Holborn (1547) the earl and seventeen of his followers lay dead out of thirty-five who had been poisoned. No inquiry was made into that crime. "God called him to His mercy," the Irish said of this patriot Ormond, "before he could see that day after which doubtless he longed and looked--the restitution of the house of Kildare." His son was held fast in London to be brought up, as far as education could do it, an Englishman.
The third line of the Anglo-Norman leaders was laid low. The earl of Desmond, after twenty-five years of alternate prison and war, saw the chief leaders of his house hanged or slain, before he himself was killed in 1583: and his wretched son, born in the Tower, was brought from that prison to be shown to his heart-broken people--stunted in body, enfeebled in mind, half an idiot, a protestant--"the Tower Earl," "the Queen's Earl," cried the people.
The Irish chiefs were also broken by guile and assassination. O'Brien was separated from his people by a peerage (1543), an English inauguration without the ancient rites as head of his lands, and an English guard of soldiers (1558). That house played no further part in the Irish struggle.
The chief warrior of the north and terror of Elizabeth's generals was Shane O'Neill. The deputy Sidney devised many plots to poison or kill the man he could not conquer, and at last brought over from Scotland hired assassins who accomplished the murder (1567). A map made in the reign of Elizabeth marked the place of the crime that relieved England of her greatest fear--"Here Shane O'Neill was slain." After him the struggle of the north to keep their land and independence was maintained by negotiation and by war for forty years, under the leading of the greatest of Irish statesmen and generals Hugh O'Neill earl of Tyrone, and the soldier-patriot Aedh Ruadh O'Donnell earl of Tirconnell. English intrigue triumphed when Red Hugh was poisoned by a secret agent (1602) and when by a crafty charge of conspiracy his brother Rory O'Donnell and Hugh O'Neill were driven from their country (1607). The flight of the earls marked the destruction by violence of the old Gaelic polity--that federation of tribes which had made of their common country the storehouse of Europe for learning, the centre of the noblest mission-work that the continent ever knew, the home of arts and industries, the land of a true democracy where men held the faith of a people owning their soil, instructed in their traditions, and themselves guardians of their national life.
