they nevertheless won the game by recourse to means that no Irishman,
save he who had joined them for purposes of revenge or in pursuit of
selfish personal aims, could possibly have adopted. The fight from
the first was an unequal one. Irish valour, chivalry, and personal
strength were matched against wealth, treachery and cunning. The Irish
better bodies were overcome by the worse hearts. As Curran put it in
1817--"The triumph of England over Ireland is the triumph of guilt
over innocence."

The Earl of Essex who came to Ireland in 1599 with one of the largest
forces of English troops that, up to then, had ever been dispatched
into Ireland (18,000 men), had ascribed his complete failure, in
writing to the Queen, to the physical superiority of the Irish:

"These rebels are more in number than your Majesty's army and have
(though I do unwillingly confess it), better bodies, and perfecter
use of their arms, than those men who your Majesty sends over."

The Queen, who followed the war in Ireland with a swelling wrath on
each defeat, and a growing fear that the Spaniards would keep their
promise to land aid to the Irish princes, O'Neill and O'Donnell,
issued "instructions" and a set of "ordinances" for the conduct of the
war in Ireland, which, while enjoining recourse to the usual methods
outside the field of battle--(i.e. starvation, "politic courses,"
assassination of leaders; and the sowing of dissension by means of
bribery and promises), required for the conflict, that her weaker
soldiers should be protected against the onslaught of the unarmoured
Irishmen by head pieces of steel. She ordered "every soldier to be
enforced to wear a murrion, because the enemy is encouraged by
the advantage of arms to _come to the sword_ wherein he commonly