wn jewels; but after holding a parliament and making much courtly
display before the native chieftains, on several of whom he conferred
knighthood, he returned to England. Five years later, enriched with the
spoils of his uncle, John of Gaunt, Richard returned to Ireland, landing
at Waterford, whence he marched through the counties of Kilkenny and
Wicklow, and subsequently arrived in Dublin, where he remained a
fortnight, sumptuously entertained by the provost, as the chief
magistrate of the city was then called, till intelligence of the
invasion of his kingdom by Bolingbroke recalled him to England.

In 1534 Lord Thomas Fitzgerald, better known as Silken Thomas (so called
because of a fantastic fringe worn in the helmet of his followers), a
young man of rash courage and good abilities, son of the Lord Deputy
Kildare, believing his father, who was imprisoned in the Tower of
London, to have been beheaded, organized a rebellion against the English
Government, and marched with his followers from the mansion of the earls
of Kildare in Thomas Court, through Dame's Gate to St Mary's Abbey,
where, in the council chamber, he proclaimed himself a rebel. On his
appearing before the wall with a powerful force, the citizens were
induced through fear to give admission to a detachment of his troops to
besiege the castle; but, on hearing that he had met with a reverse in
another quarter, they suddenly closed their gates and detained his men
as prisoners. He then attacked the city itself; but, finding it too
strong to be seized by a _coup de main_, he raised the siege on
condition of having his captured soldiers exchanged for the children of
some of the principal citizens who had fallen into his hands. After much
vicissitude of fortune, Lord Thomas and others concerned in this
rebellion were executed at Tyburn in 1536.

At the outbreak of civil war in 1641, a conspiracy of the Irish septs,
under the direction of Roger Moore, to seize Dublin Castle, was
disclosed by one Owen Connolly on the eve of the day on which the
attempt was to have been made, and the city was thus preserved for the
king's party; but the Irish outside began an indiscriminate
extermination of the Protestant population. In 1646 Dublin was besieged,
but without success, by the Irish army of 16,000 foot and 1600 horse,
under the guidance of the Pope's nuncio Rinuccini and others, banded
together "to restore and establish in Ireland the exercise of the Roman
Catholic r