believed that 18,000 Spanish troops had actually landed at Wexford.)
That these rebellions were crushed by the forces of Queen Elizabeth
with a savage violence that is more suggestive of the government of
the Netherlands by Spain than of what should have been the action of
a Christian nation cannot be denied; but when reading the accounts
of the terrible condition to which the country was reduced one cannot
help thinking that the stories of outrages committed by the English
troops must be exaggerated. In the first place, the writers, even when
eye-witnesses, seem to have assumed that the country was peaceful and
prosperous up to that time; whereas not only had the tribal wars which
had gone on incessantly until a few years before reduced the people
almost to a condition of famine, but the rebels themselves, such
as O'Neill and Desmond, had ravaged the country anew. And if it was
obvious that the object of Elizabeth was to exterminate the whole
Irish population and the Roman Catholic religion, it seems impossible
(even allowing for the eccentricity of human nature in general and of
the Irish character in particular) to believe that a large part of the
queen's forces should have been composed of Irish Roman Catholics; or
that the inhabitants of the towns, most of whom were also Irish Roman
Catholics, should have taken her side; but such was undoubtedly
the case. Again, if nearly the whole native population had been
exterminated by slaughter and famine it would have taken at least a
century to recover. Yet--a few years after the commencement of
the English settlement we find Spenser complaining that the new
proprietors were acting as the Norman barons had done centuries
before; instead of keeping out the Irish they were making them their
tenants and thrusting out the English; and some of the proprietors
were themselves becoming "mere Irish." Then, although no doubt
a certain proportion of the Elizabethan settlers renounced their
Protestantism and embraced the Roman Catholic religion, that can