f his accession indeed the Irish lords felt the heavier
hand of a master. The Geraldines, who had been suffered under the
preceding reign to govern Ireland in the name of the Crown, were quick to
discover that the Crown would no longer stoop to be their tool. Their
head, the Earl of Kildare, was called to England and thrown into the
Tower. The great house resolved to frighten England again into a
conviction of its helplessness; and a rising of Lord Thomas Fitzgerald in
1534 followed the usual fashion of Irish revolts. A murder of the
Archbishop of Dublin, a capture of the city, a repulse before its castle,
a harrying of the Pale, ended in a sudden disappearance of the rebels
among the bogs and forests of the border on the advance of the English
forces. It had been usual to meet such an onset as this by a raid of the
same character, by a corresponding failure before the castle of the
rebellious noble, and a retreat like his own which served as a preliminary
to negotiations and a compromise. Unluckily for the Fitzgeralds Henry
resolved to take Ireland seriously in hand, and he had Cromwell to execute
his will. Skeffington, a new Lord Deputy who was sent over in 1535,
brought with him a train of artillery which worked a startling change in
the political aspect of the island. The castles that had hitherto
sheltered rebellion were battered into ruins. Maynooth, a stronghold from
which the Geraldines threatened Dublin and ruled the Pale at their will,
was beaten down in a fortnight. So crushing and unforeseen was the blow
that resistance was at once at an end. Not only was the power of the great
Norman house which had towered over Ireland utterly broken, but only a
single boy was left to preserve its name.

[Sidenote: Conquest of Ireland]

With the fall of the Fitzgeralds Ireland felt itself in a master's grasp.
"Irishmen," wrote one of the Lord Justices to Cromwell, "were never in
such fear as now. The king's sessions are being kept in five shires more
than formerly." Not only were the Englishmen of the Pale at Henry's feet
but the kerns of Wicklow and Wexford sent in their submission; and for the
first time in men's memory an English army appeared in Munster and reduced
the south to obedience. The border of the Pale was crossed, and the wide
territory where the Celtic tribes had preserved their independence since
the days of the Angevins was trampled into subjection. A castle of the
O'Briens which guarded the passage of t