The new creed of the three preceding reigns had not, up to that period,
acquired sufficient strength to exert its deadliest influence against
the ancient faith of the people, or to be introduced as a new agency of
oppression in the case of Ireland; but now, no sooner had the "Virgin
Queen" ascended the throne, than the heart of the tigress leaped within
her; and, breaking loose from every restraint, human and divine, she at
once pounced upon the unfortunate Irish, and sought to bury her
merciless fangs, with one deadly and final crash, in their already
bleeding and lacerated vitals. The coarse, cruel fibre of an apostate
and libertine father, and the impure blood of a lewd mother, had done
their work in her case. From the first to the last moment of her reign,
she combined the courtesan with the assassin. She was the murderer of
Essex, said to have been her own son and paramour; and was, at the same
time, the mistress of more than one noble besides Leicester. According
to her own countryman, Cobbett, she spilled more blood during her
occupancy of the throne, than any other single agency in the world for
a commensurate period; while her treatment of Ireland, under the
"humane guidance" and advice of such cruel wretches as Spenser, was
neither more nor less than absolutely satanic. For fifteen long years
she never ceased to subject that unhappy land to famine, fire and
sword. Every device that her hellish nature or that of her agents could
concoct for the total extirpation of the people, was put into the most
relentless requisition by her. Under the guise of the most sincere
friendship, her deputies, times without number, betrayed many of the
leaders of the Irish into accepting their hospitality, and then foully
set upon them and murdered them while they sat unsuspecting guests at
their festive board. And yet, notwithstanding her penal laws, her
blood-thirsty soldiery, and all her revolting persecutions, the Irish
were more than a match for her in the open field, and ultimately
embittered the closing years of her life. From the first moment of the