to surrender, if he and his people
were allowed to return to Scotland. The conditions were rejected. The
Scots yielded at discretion, and every living creature in the place,
except the chief and his family (who were probably reserved for
ransom), was immediately put to the sword. Two hundred were killed in
the castle. It was then discovered that several hundred more, chiefly
mothers and their little ones, were hidden in the caves about
the shore. There was no remorse, nor even the faintest shadow of
perception that the occasion called for it. They were hunted out as if
they had been seals or otters, and all destroyed. Sorleyboy and other
chiefs, Essex coolly wrote, had sent their wives and children into the
island, "which be all taken and executed to the number of six hundred.
Sorleyboy himself," he continued, "stood upon the mainland of the
Glynnes and saw the taking of the island, and was likely to have run
mad for sorrow, tearing and tormenting himself, and saying that he
there lost all that he ever had!" The impression left upon the mind by
this horrible story, is increased by the composure with which even the
news of it was received. "Yellow-haired Charley," wrote Essex to
the queen, "might tear himself for his pretty little ones and
their _dam_," but in Ireland itself the massacre was not specially
distinguished in the general system of atrocity. Essex described it
himself as one of the exploits with which he was most satisfied; and
Elizabeth, in answer to his letters, bade him tell John Norris, "the
executioner of his well-designed enterprise, that she would not be
unmindful of his services."'

I have transcribed this narrative partly for the sake of the
reflection with which Mr. Froude concludes. He says: 'But though
passed over and unheeded at the time, and lying buried for three
hundred years, the bloody stain comes back to the light again, not in
myth or legend, but in the original account of the nobleman by whose
command the deed was done; and when the history of England's dealings
with Ireland settles at last into its final shape, that hunt among the
caves at Rathlin will not be forgotten.'[1] It was for services like
these that Essex got the barony of Farney, in the county Monaghan. He
had mortgaged his English estates to the queen for 10,000 l.,and after
his plundering expeditions in Ireland he went home to pay his debts.

[Footnote 1: History of England, vol. xi. p.184.]

Further on Mr. Froude has an