sappointments, he performed in various parts of the country; and
having returned to England in 1575 to lay all his grievances before the
queen, and face the court faction which injured him in his absence, he
was sent back with the title of Marshal of Ireland, an appointment
which Leicester, for his own purposes, is said to have been active in
procuring him.

Sir Henry Sidney had now succeeded Fitzwilliams as lord-deputy; and from
him it does not appear that Essex had the same systematic opposition to
encounter: on the contrary, having been applied to by the queen for his
opinion of the expediency of granting several requests of the earl
relative to this service, sir Henry advised her majesty to comply with
most of them, prefacing his counsel with the following sentence: "Of the
earl I must say, that he is so noble and worthy a personage, and so
forward in all his actions, and so complete a gentleman wherein he may
either advance your honor or service, as you may take comfort to have in
store so rare a subject, who hath nothing in greater regard than to show
himself such an one indeed as the common fame reporteth him; which hath
been no more, in troth, than his due deserts and painful travels in the
worst parts of this miserable country have deserved[78]."

[Note 78: "Sidney Papers," vol. i.]

Such in fact was the apparent cordiality between the deputy and the
marshal, that a proposal passed for the marriage of Philip Sidney to the
lady Penelope Devereux daughter of the earl: but if this friendship were
ever sincere on the part of sir Henry, it was at least short-lived; for,
writing a few months after Essex's death to Leicester respecting the
earl of Ormond, whom the favorite regarded as his enemy, he says.... "In
fine, my lord, I am ready to accord with him; but, my most dear lord
and brother, be you upon your keeping for him; for, if Essex had lived,
you should have found him as violent an enemy as his heart, power and
cunning would have served him to have been; and for that their malice, I
take God to record, I could brook neither of them both[79]."

[Note 79: "Sidney Papers," vol. i.]

Ireland was, during the whole of Elizabeth's reign, that part of her
dominions which it cost her most trouble to govern, and with which her
system of policy prospered the least. Without a considerable military
force it was impossible to bring into subjection those parts of the
country which still remained in a state of barbarism un