The state of affairs in Ireland was not quite so bad as it might have been. After the disaster on the Blackwater, rebellion had sprung up sporadically all over the island; the outlying regions were everywhere in open revolt; but Tyrone had not made the most of his opportunity, had not advanced on Dublin, but had frittered away the months during which he had been left undisturbed by his enemies in idleness and indecision. He was a man who was more proficient in the dilatory arts of negotiation — sly bargaining, prolonged manoeuvring, the judicious making and breaking of promises — than in the vigorous activities of war. Of Irish birth and English breeding, half savage and half gentleman, half Catholic and half sceptic, a schemer, a lounger, an adventurer, and a visionary, he had come at last, somehow or other, after years of diffused cunning, to be the leader of a nation and one of the pivots upon which the politics of Europe turned. A quiet life was what he longed for — so he declared; a quiet life, free alike from the intolerance of Protestantism and the barbarism of war; and a quiet life, curiously enough, was what in the end he was to be given. But the end was not yet, and in the meantime all was disturbance and uncertainty. It had been impossible for him to assimilate his English Earldom with the chieftainship of the O’Neils. His hesitating attempts to be a loyal vassal of the Saxons had yielded to the pressure of local patriotism; he had intrigued and rebelled; he had become the client of Philip of Spain. More than once the English had held him at their mercy, had accepted his submission, and had reinstated him in his honours and his lands. More than once, after trading on their fluctuating policies of severity and moderation, he had treacherously turned against them the power and the influence which their protection had enabled him to acquire. Personal animosities had been added to public feuds. He had seduced the sister of Sir Henry Bagenal, had carried her off and married her, in spite of her brother’s teeth; she had died in misery; and Sir Henry, advancing with his army to meet the rebel at the Blackwater, had been defeated and killed. After such a catastrophe, it seemed certain that the only possible issue was an extreme one. This time the English Government would admit no compromise, and Tyrone must be finally crushed. But Tyrone’s own view was very different; he was averse from extremity; he lingered vaguely in Ulster; the old system of resistance, bargaining, compromise, submission, and reconciliation, which had served him so often, might very well prove useful once again.

But one thing was clear: if the English Government desired the speedy destruction of Tyrone, it could have chosen no one more anxious to second its purposes than the new Lord Deputy. For Essex, it was obvious, an Irish victory was vital. Would he achieve one? Francis Bacon was not the only observer at Court to be pessimistic on that subject. A foreboding gloom was in the air. When John Harington was about to follow his patron to Ireland with a command in the Cavalry, he received from his kinsman, Robert Markham, who had an office about the Court, a weighty letter of advice and instruction. Harington was bidden to be most careful in his conduct; there would be spies in the Irish army, who would report everything to high-placed ill-wishers at home. “Obey the Lord Deputy in all things,” wrote Markham, “but give not your opinion; it may be heard in England.” The general situation, Markham thought, was menacing. “Observe,” he said, “the man who commandeth, and yet is commanded himself; he goeth not forth to serve the Queen’s realm, but to humour his own revenge.” . . . “If the Lord Deputy,” he went on, “performs in the field what he hath promised in the Council, all will be well; but, though the Queen hath granted forgiveness for his late demeanour in her presence, we know not what to think hereof. She hath, in all outward semblance, placed confidence in the man who so lately sought other treatment at her hands; we do sometime think one way, and sometime another; what betideth the Lord Deputy is known to Him only who knoweth all; but when a man hath so many shewing friends and so many unshewing enemies, who learneth his end below? . . . Sir William Knollys is not well pleased, the Queen is not well pleased, the Lord Deputy may be pleased now, but I sore fear what may happen hereafter.”

To such warnings, no doubt, Harington — a gay spark, who had translated Ariosto into English verse and written a Rabelaisian panegyric on water closets — paid no great heed; but in fact they expressed, with an exactness that was prophetic, the gist of the situation. The expedition was a gamble. If Essex won in Ireland, he won in England too; but the dice were loaded against him; and if he failed . . . From the very first, the signs were unpropitious. The force of sixteen thousand foot and fifteen hundred horse, which had been collected for the expedition, was, for an Elizabethan army, a well-equipped and efficient one; but that was the beginning and the end of the Lord Deputy’s advantages. His relations with the Home Governments were far from satisfactory. Elizabeth distrusted him — distrusted his capacity and even, perhaps, his intentions; and the Secretary, who now dominated the Council, was his rival, if not his enemy. His wishes were constantly thwarted, and his decisions overruled. A serious quarrel broke out before he had left England. He had appointed Sir Christopher Blount to be one of his Council, and Lord Southampton his General of the Horse; both appointments were cancelled by Elizabeth. Her objections to Sir Christopher are unknown — possibly she considered his Catholicism a bar to high position in Ireland; but Southampton, who had incurred her supreme displeasure by carrying on an intrigue with Elizabeth Vernon, one of her ladies-in-waiting, and then daring to marry her — Southampton, whom, in her fury, she had put into prison together with his bride — that Essex should have ventured to name this young reprobate for a high command seemed to her little short of a deliberate impertinence. There was some fierce correspondence; but she held firm; the two men followed Essex as private friends only; and the Lord Deputy arrived in Dublin — it was April 1599 — in a gloomy mood and a fretted temper.

He was immediately faced with a strategical question of crucial importance. Should he at once proceed to Ulster and dispose of Tyrone, or should he first suppress the smouldering disaffection in the other parts of the island? The English Council in Dublin recommended the latter course, and Essex agreed with them. It would be easier, he thought, to deal with the main forces of the rebellion when its subsidiary supports had been demolished. Possibly he was right; but the decision implied a swift and determined execution; to waste too much time and too much energy on minor operations would be worse than useless. That was obvious, and the subduing of a few recalcitrant chiefs with a powerful English army seemed a simple enough affair. Essex marched into Leinster, confident that nothing could resist him — and nothing could. But he was encountered by something more dangerous than resistance — by the soft, insidious, undermining atmosphere of that paradoxical country which, a quarter of a century earlier, had brought his father to despair and death.

The strange air engulfed him. The strange land — charming, savage, mythical — lured him on with indulgent ease. He moved, triumphant, through a new peculiar universe of the unimagined and the unreal. Who or what were these people, with their mantles and their nakedness, their long locks of hair hanging over their faces, their wild battle-cries and gruesome wailings, their kerns and their gallowglas, their jesters and their bards? Who were their ancestors? Scythians? Or Spaniards? Or Gauls? What state of society was this, where chiefs jostled with gypsies, where ragged women lay all day long laughing in the hedgerows, where ragged men gambled away among each other their very rags, their very forelocks, the very . . . parts more precious still, where wizards flew on whirlwinds, and rats were rhymed into dissolution? All was vague, contradictory, and unaccountable; and the Lord Deputy, advancing further and further into the green wilderness, began — like so many others before and after him — to catch the surrounding infection, to lose the solid sense of things, and to grow confused over what was fancy and what was fact.

His conquering army was welcomed everywhere by the English settlers. The towns threw open their gates to him, and he was harangued in Latin by delighted Mayors. He passed from Leinster into Munster — still victorious. But time was slipping away. Days and days were spent over the reduction of unimportant castles. Essex had never shown any military genius — only a military taste; and his taste was gratified now, as it had never been before, by successful skirmishes, romantic escapades, noble gestures, and personal glory. The cost was serious. He had lost sight of his main purpose in a tangle of insignificant incidents. And while he was playing with time his strength was dwindling. Under the combined influences of casualties, desertions, disease, and the garrisoning of distant outposts, his army was melting away. At last, in July, he found himself back in Dublin, having spent nearly three months in dubious operations far from the real force of the enemy, and with the numbers of the men under his command diminished by one-half.

Then the mist of illusion melted, and he was faced with the deplorable truth. At this late hour, with his weakened army, was it possible any longer to make sure of crushing Tyrone? In extreme agitation he counted up the chances, and knew not which way to turn. Wherever he looked, a gulf seemed to open at his feet. If he failed against Tyrone, how fatal! If he did nothing, what a derision! Unable to bring himself to admit that he had muddled away his opportunity, he sought relief in random rage and wild accusations, in fits of miserable despair, and passionate letters to Elizabeth. A detachment of some hundreds of men had shown cowardice in the field; he cashiered and imprisoned all the officers, he executed a lieutenant, and he had every tenth man in the rank and file put to death. He fell ill, and death seemed to come near to him too; he would welcome it. He rose from his couch to write a long letter to the Queen, of exposition and expostulation. “But why do I talk of victory or success? Is it not known that from England I receive nothing but discomfort and soul’s wounds? Is it not spoken in the army that your Majesty’s favour is diverted from me, and that already you do bode ill both to me and it? . . . Is it not lamented of your Majesty’s faithfullest subjects, both there and here, that a Cobham or a Raleigh — I will forbear others for their places’ sakes — should have such credit and favour with your Majesty when they wish the ill-success of your Majesty’s most important action? . . . Let me honestly and zealously end a wearisome life. Let others live in deceitful and inconstant pleasures. Let me bear the brunt, and die meritoriously . . . Till then, I protest before God and His Angels, I am a true votary, that is sequestered from all things but my duty and my charge . . . This is the hand of him that did live your dearest, and will die your Majesty’s faithfullest servant.”

There was a sudden rising in Connaught which had to be put down; the rebels were defeated by Sir Christopher Blount; but by now July was over, and the Lord Deputy was still in Dublin. Meanwhile, at home, as time flowed by, and no news of any decisive action came from Ireland, men’s minds were divided between doubt and expectation. At Court the tone was cynical. “Men marvel,” a gossip wrote on August 1, “Essex hath done so little; he tarries yet at Dublin.” The decimation of the soldiers was “not greatly liked,” and when news came that the Lord Deputy had used the powers specially given him by the Queen to make no fewer than fifty-nine knights, there was much laughter and shrugging of shoulders. But elsewhere the feeling was different. The people of London still had high hopes for their favourite — hopes which were voiced by Shakespeare in a play which he produced at this moment at the Globe Theatre. Southampton was the friend and patron of the rising dramatist, who took this opportunity of making a graceful public allusion to Southampton’s own patron and friend.

“How London doth pour out her citizens!”

So spoke the Chorus in “Henry V,” describing the victorious return............