eatly troubled at what she heard. But watching her opportunity, whilst
the mayor was taking his leave, and the doctor politely accompanying him
down stairs, she opened the box, took out the commission, and in its
stead laid a sheet of paper, with a pack of cards, and the _knave of
clubs_ at top. The doctor, not suspecting the trick that had been played
him, put up the box, and arrived with it in Dublin, in September, 1558.

Anxious to accomplish the intentions of his "_pious_" mistress, he
immediately waited upon Lord Fitz-Walter, at that time viceroy, and
presented the box to him; which being opened, nothing was found in it
but a pack of cards. This startling all the persons present, his
lordship said, "We must procure another commission; and in the mean time
let us shuffle the cards!"

Dr. Cole, however, would have directly returned to England to get
another commission; but waiting for a favourable wind, news arrived that
queen Mary was dead, and by this means the protestants escaped a most
cruel persecution. The above relation as we before observed, is
confirmed by historians of the greatest credit, who add, that queen
Elizabeth settled a pension of forty pounds per annum upon the above
mentioned Elizabeth Edmunds, for having thus saved the lives of her
protestant subjects.

During the reigns of Elizabeth and James I. Ireland was almost
constantly agitated by rebellions and insurrections, which, although not
always taking their rise from the difference of religious opinions
between the English and Irish, were aggravated and rendered more bitter
and irreconcilable from that cause. The popish priests artfully
exaggerated the faults of the English government, and continually urged
to their ignorant and prejudiced hearers the lawfulness of killing the
protestants, assuring them that all catholics who were slain in the
prosecution of so _pious_ an enterprise, would be immediately received
into everlasting felicity. The naturally ungovernable dispositions of
the Irish, acted upon by these designing men, drove them into continual
acts of barbarous and unjustifiable violence; and it must be confessed
that the unsettled and arbitrary nature of the authority exercised by
the English governors, was but little calculated to gain their
affections. The Spaniards, too, by landing forces in the south, and
giving every encouragement to the discontented natives to join their
standard, kept the island in a continual state of turbulen