presence.

[Sidenote: _Anger against the Irish Lord Deputy._]

[Sidenote: _New Combinations._]

He chafed at the light restraint. He affected indignation at the
severity of the penalty with which his 'great treasons,' as he called
them in mockery, were visited. He did not attempt to dispute its
legality, more than questionable as that was. Almost from the first he
evinced the extraordinary elasticity of nature, which was to be tried a
hundredfold hereafter. While he protested against the inevitable he
carved his life to suit it. From his gaol issued messages of despair and
of business in the strangest medley. He was much exercised about his
Irish estate; and he cast his burden upon Cecil: 'Your cousin, the
doting Deputy,' Fitzwilliam, he wrote, had been distraining on his
tenants for a supposed debt from himself as Undertaker. A sum of L400
for arrears of rent was demanded, though all Munster had scarce so much
money in it. The same Fitzwilliam, he alleges, had been mulcting the
Queen L1200 a year for a band of worthless soldiers in Youghal, under 'a
base fellow, O'Dodall.' Perhaps his estimate of the Captain may not be
unbiassed. A Sir John Dowdall seems to have disputed his title to, and,
two years later, to have ejected him from possession of, the manor of
Ardmore and other lands demised to him in 1592 by Bishop Witherhead of
Lismore. He was aggrieved by Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam's slowness to aid
him in his litigations. He thought it, as it was, 'a sign how my
disgraces have passed the seas.' At least his warnings of a rising of
the Burkes, O'Donells, and O'Neales need not have been neglected. 'I
wrote,' he complained, 'in a letter of Mr. Killigrew's ten days past a
prophecy of this rebellion, which when the Queen read she made a scorn
of my conceit.' Not that it was anything in reality to him. He cared not
either for life or lands. He was become, he declared with some
zoological confusion, 'like a fish cast on dry land, gasping for breath,
with lame legs and lamer lungs.' Still, he felt bound to point out the
pity of it. Then too, he reminded the High Admiral, there was the Great
Susan, 'which nobody but myself would undertake to set out.' It could
hardly be more profitable to punish him than that he 'should either
strengthen the fleet, or do many other things that lie in the ditches.'
Among them, for instance, was the business of keeping in order, as he
alone could, the soldiers and mariners 'that came in the priz