For thirty-seven years Calvagh now led his people’s fight against “the English manner of government,” in other words, the destruction of the Irish. He seized more lords and officers, won more wealth, and recovered more Irish territory than any lord in Leinster. At this time the Desmonds, out of favour under Lancastrian kings, had withdrawn to Munster to build up their dominion in the south, while the Ormonds and their cousins and rivals the Talbots fought for power. Passing strangers appeared in Dublin Castle; but with occasional interruptions the actual authority swung back, now to Ormond and his half-brother the prior of Kilmainham, now to Talbot and his brother the Archbishop of Dublin, till each family had held the chief control many times. The Talbots stood for pure English rule, and excelled in severity alike towards colonists and natives. They used for their wars and their rewards Irish taxes, coyn and livery; but at Westminster they represented Ormond’s iniquity in levying the like taxes, and his faint and wavering sympathies for his countrymen, as treason of the darkest hue; his favouring his Irish friends, keeping Irish soldiers for his following, letting lands slip into Irish hands, making Irishmen knights of the shire; with a few additions thrown in of his sloth, violence, and corruption--“courses ruinous and destructive” to the English. In the midst of this discord Calvagh seems to have leaned to Ormond. His wife, apparently by a friendly arrangement, was given tribute from an Ormond lordship in Kildare. He himself held Talbot’s cousin Thomas to ransom in his prison at Killeigh: he took “blackrent” or tribute from the English of Meath.