SIR HENRY SYDNEY'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

BY FITZ-HERBERT.

PART II.

LET me pass from Anglo-Irish politics to a more amusing subject, personal history.

Excellent Sir Henry Sydney was, both publicly and privately; and though he stands extraordinarily free from aspersion, some spots in the disk of his fame are so plain as to require notice, especially since the truth of his character would be incompletely drawn if I attempted to ignore them. He has himself displayed one of these faults, his non-avoidance of debt, which he carried to a vice. But he seems to have escaped calumny, so far as the fair sex is concerned; except, perhaps, in a case referred to in a letter from his brother-in-law to Cecil, dated June, 1565, desiring that "Sir Henry Sydney be openly cautioned against keeping company with Mistress Isham."* The lady who was to be avoided as a very Delilah was, it appears, a daughter of an English gentleman who filled the station of seneschal of the county of Wexford; and she seems to have been a political intriguante, whose captivating qualities and entraînemens had led Sir Nicholas Arnold, the ex-governor, into favouring certain rebellious scions of her AngloIrish connexions. This feminine weaver of toils would seem to have then been a spinster, and the same who, afterwards, when relict of Nicholas Hore, Esq., of Harperston, in that county, was married by Arnold, her original admirer, and, according to the heraldic visitation of the county, lived till the year 1616, exhibiting, by such longevity, a constitution as vigorous as her mother-wit. Sydney, indeed, was only named to his new government when the caution was sent him, and, on going over, was accompanied by his wife, the admirable sister of Leicester. The accounts of this noble couple's miseries in travelling are amusing to read now, when meaner travellers than a vice-king and queen enjoy lordly luxuries in express trains and swift steamers. On the 24th November, 1566, the distinguished voyagers reach Chester; and, on the 3rd of the next month, make, from Hilbry, the old complaint of that time, "no wind for Ireland," adding that they were never so weary of any place, and can get neither meat, drink, nor good lodging." The wind continuing unfavourable, they reached no farther, on the 17th December, than Beaumaris, having "passed thirty days flitting from place to place on the coast." Some barks put to sea with their horses and furniture; but one of these tiny transports was wrecked, to the loss of 500l. worth of Sydney's goods. On the 9th January the wind-bound viceroy was at Holyhead, enjoying "great likelihood of a fair breeze." Their destination was not reached until the 21st, so that they lost two months in a 'journey one day now suffices for. To revert to the ungenial question of our autobiographer's misdoings: it would demand too much space to rip up matters proving that his Excellency the Chief Governor of Ireland

* Calendar of State Papers.

was not always excellently impartial. His factious animosity to the Earl of Ormond occasionally hurried him into violent measures against this mighty nobleman's relatives, and the strength of his friendships sometimes led him into despotic favouritism. Sir Peter Carew, whose interesting memoirs have been recently published, was most unjustly backed by Sydney's star-chamber power in wresting an estate from the earl's brother. Yet, as this nobleman had a potent supporter in his relative, the good and great Queen Elizabeth, her representative dared do little more than demonstrate his dislike. The enmity between her deputy and the earl, the greatest, the most English of her Irish peers, and the mainstay of the Protestant religion in Ireland, caused much difficulty to her majesty, with whom this eminent nobleman (her "black husband," as she used merrily to style him) was an especial and worthy favourite. Cecil in vain endeavoured to reconcile them; writing, in one instance, to Sydney in praise of the earl's "loyalty and painfulness in all service," and reminding him that his royal mistress's good opinion of Ormond "grew from memory of his education with that holy young Solomon, Edward the Sixth."

Leicester advanced and guided his brother-in-law, our autobiographer, who, by singular coincidence, was in similar relationship to Sussex, the chief of the opposing faction. Several anecdotes are told of the haughty favourite's insolence to the Irish earl, and, also, of the latter's spirited retorts. There is also the pleasing anecdote of Ormond's magnanimity when young Sydney affronted him, because the latter believed some wrong had been done to his father: "I will accept no quarrel," said the highminded Anglo-Irish nobleman, "from a gentleman that is bound by nature to defend his father's causes, and is furnished with so many virtues as I know Mr. Philip Sydney to be."

Edmond Lodge, an author largely experienced in the art of writing brief biographies, observes with much truth, in his "Portraits of Illustrious Personages of Great Britain," that biography, like painting, derives its main interest from the contrast of lights and shadows; and he continues to say that, "however necessary it may be that the judgment should be assured of the truth of the representation, yet the fancy must be gratified. The virtues which adorned the living man are faint ornaments on his posthumous story, without the usual opposition of instances of infirmity and extravagance." Otherwise, he concludes, the portrait of human character will appear unnatural, and even insipid. These incontrovertible remarks preface his sketch of the life of Sir Philip Sydney, whose almost unvaried excellence can hardly be brought out, to use the technical phrase, for want of shade;-they apply, of course, to every endeavour to portray character, and are specially applicable to my present humble attempt to supply materials for a memoir of this English Bayard's father, no monographic account of whom has yet appeared. But the task of raking in the cinders of the feux d'artifice illuminating his life, for defects to be used artistically, is so hateful, that I abandon it, to recur to the general topic of partisanship, as it affected Ireland.

Walsingham, to whom Sydney's memorial, or appeal, is addressed, has defined "a worthy man" as "one that doeth brave, eminent acts;" and, *He was reprehended for favouring Stukeley. See Collins's Sydney Letters, and my Memoir of Stukeley in this periodical.

though the memorialist nobly fulfilled this definition, there is no doubt that he owed his advancement and protracted official standing to his brother-in-law Leicester, the Ursa Major (as he was wittily called, from his cognisance, a bear) of the political firmament-a constellation ever pointed to the guiding star, Queen Elizabeth. Hence the attempts of Ormond to unseat Sydney, in his ambition of obtaining continuous government of his native country, after the custom of his forefathers; and he seems to have been covertly aided by Sir Henry's honest brother-inlaw, the martial and rarely endowed Sussex. The antipathy between the Great Bear and Sussex, his rival for power, whose sterling character is delightfully drawn in "Kenilworth," may be judged of by the dying caveat the latter gave his friends: "I leave you," said he, "to your fortunes, and the queen's goodness; but beware of the Gipsy (meaning Leicester), for he will be too hard for you all; you know not the beast so well as I do."

The author of the "Faerie Queene," and of a "View of the State of Ireland," designates that country (in which he had resided many years, but of which he had not then taken his last, his heart-broken view) a ragged commonweale," as certainly it was, impoverished by civil war, and torn by the perpetual rebellions fomented by the King of Spain and the Roman Pontiff. Not only did those great potentates, temporal and spiritual, exert a noxious part in stimulating various powerful rebels to throw off the English yoke, and not merely were there numberless factions, from the universal ancient feud between Gael and Teuton, to minor mortal enmities, as between Butler and Geraldine, down to those lesser, yet fiercer, intestine hatreds among clans-but the high political parties in London, principally attached on one side to Leicester, and on the other to Sussex, ramified, in their influence, even into penetrating wretched bogs and glens in Offaley and Donegal, where an O'More, or an O'Donnell, ousted from his chieftaincy by intrigues that received an im petus from Whitehall, ended his turbulent life. The most curious, if not the most interesting statements in Sydney's valuable narrative, are those which reveal the policy of the day, as it was used towards the native magnate peers and insurgent chieftains. This memoir, indeed, emanating from the head of the Elizabethan government in Ireland, will, if taken in connexion with other histories, and especially with annals composed by Gaelic recluses, who knew little of state secrets, and who are sometimes contradictory of the English accounts, afford either contradictions to them, or serviceable confirmations of them.

For example, Archbishop O'Daly, who, though inquisitor-general in Portugal, had not penetrated the state secrets of his own country, says, in his curious "History of the Geraldines," how the queen, "having formed a plan to crush the Earl of Desmond," wrote letters, in the year 1575, to her crafty viceroy, desiring him "to lay a snare for the earl," and now, on receiving this order, he invited several of the nobility to Dublin to confer with him on political matters, and particularly regarding religion; and how, having instructions to arrest Desmond on his appearance, both the earl and his brother were, although carrying "a safeconduct" from Sydney, committed to the castle, and subsequently "sent off to London, shut up in the Tower, and condemned to pass five weary years in its loathsome solitude." Now, let us say, without entering into

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particulars, that our Protestant autobiographer's version of this affair differs from the Popish archbishop's. The earl had also been arrested, ten years previously, by the same bold hand, which thus graphically gives the following account of the perilous proceeding:

"The earl of Desmond met me at Carrick, a house of Ormonde's, and I carried him with me to Waterford, Dungarvan, and Corke, all the way hearing and ordering the complaints between the two earls. When he found that I dealt justlie with Ormonde, and that I rather shewed favour than severitie, as indeed I did to all his " (the ink must have reddened when Sydney wrote this!), "he, after sundry speeches of very hard digestion, expressing his malicious intentions, would have gone from me, which I denied him, and unwitting to him, appointed a guard to attend him a day and night." The narrator proceeds to tell how, on receiving information that the earl intended a forcible rescue, and had caused a great a number of men to be mustered, the writer openly arrested him in the town of Kilmallock. The state councillors and nobility in Sydney's company then came to him declaring it was not safe to attempt to lead away the Desmond as a captive out of one of his own towns, until a reinforcement could be obtained. Sir Henry was attended but by his household, and a guard of "fiftie English speres, fiftie English shott, and fiftie galloglass." He, however, wrote to the mayor of Limerick, who instantly marched forth from the gates of that city, at one o'clock the next morning, at the head of three hundred armed townsmen.

"I issued out of the town of Kilmallock," continues the lord-deputy; "but still came threatnings to me that I should be fought with by the way, and the prisoner taken from me. But I rested resolute that I would to Limerick, and lead the earl prisoner with me; and I protested to him, in the hearing of a multitude, that, if the least violence that might be, were offered to the basest churle or horseboye of my trayne, he" (the Earl) "should die of my hand; and so, mounting him on a worse horse than I ridd on, marched away with him to Lymerike."

Kentish fire warmed the breast of that brave Sydney! Elizabeth, in a letter couched in the mystic style she often politicly used, had advised him to that step, which was a bold one, considering that her deputy was in the enemy's country, and was dealing with a mighty chieftain, of unusually rash character, who, even whilst led away captive, swore roundly that next Midsummer day should see him taking revenge at the head of five thousand men.

Sydney's account of his dealings with Shane O'Neill, the independent sovereign of Ulster, is still more vivid. He gives the following lively picture of the sort of war he waged against this wild Irish king of a wilderness: "In the Christmas holidays" (1566) "I visited him in the heart of his country, where he had made as great an assemblie as he could, and had provided as great and good cheer as was to be had; and, when word was brought him that I was so near him: That is not possible!' quoth he, for the day before yesterday I know he dined and sate under his cloth of state in the Hall of Kilmaynham.' By O'Neyll's hand!' swore the messenger, he is in this country, and not far off, for I saw the red brachlach' (pennon) with the knotty club, and that is carried before none but himself'-meaning my pensel with the ragged staff (the badge of the Dudleys, assumed by our narrator). With that,

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continues the autobiographer, "he" (Shane O'Neill) "rann away, and to I shortened his Christmas, and made an end of myne own, with abundance of his good provision, which was not provided for such an unbidden guest as I. So plagued I him that time, that he was fully resolved to come in and submit himself simply to me; and, had I not dislodged, at the ordinary camp hour for going to rest, with intent to do some exploit upon a great limb of his, he had come to me the next morning: but, fearing the furie of the watch, he durst not that night. This I think was the eighth or ninth rode I made upon him, encamping sometime two, sometime three or four nights in his country; and how pleasant a life it is, that time of the year, with hunger, and after sore travaill, to harbour long and could nights in cabbans made of boughs, and covered with grass, I leave to your indifferent judgement. Thus, and by this means, I brought him very low."

O'Neill the Great was, the next year, laid quite low, Sydney contriving to turn the sword of a Scottish mercenary against this intractable rebel. The energetic viceroy, after he had, by procuring the "despatch from his evil doings" of this traitor, put an end to war in the north, and, by seizing and imprisoning the turbulent Desmond, opened a prospect of peace in the south, came over to court, not without hope of a wellmerited ovation. His arrival at Hampton Court had the air of a triumph, for he rode thither, attended by a train of two hundred gentlemen, and bringing with him several Gaelic captives and hostages, such young Hugh O'Neill, the future "arch-traitor," Tyrone, and two or three knightly chiefs of great Mac and O clans. As he entered the splendid cour d'honneur, the queen, happening to be looking out of a window in the palace, was surprised at the sight of so numerous a cavalcade, until she was told who it was that came thus grandly escorted. Well enough he may," she said, "for he holds two of the best offices in my kingdom," alluding to the deputyship of Ireland and presidency of Wales. Though honourably received by her majesty, he was mortified by the envious tongues of the court faction attached to Lord Sussex, who, grudging him successes their leader had failed to achieve, tauntingly told him that, in sooth, "the scuffle in Ulster was not worthy to be called a war, for the principal rebel was but a beggarly outlaw of no force, and, after all, killed more by chance than design.' This disparaging speech is, however, contradicted by a despatch from the lords of the privy council, proving that they well knew the political weight of the blow that had struck down the king of the north of Ireland, by declaring that "the very report to the world of the extirpation of an O'Neill, is of no small importance."

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The fate of this mighty Roman Catholic rebel had, indeed, terrified all the rebelliously inclined among the nobility of both countries, and deterred them for a time from inciting the powers of the Continent to aid their treasonable designs. The Irish recusant malcontents had looked to be led by O'Niallmore, who commanded all the north, was, as autobiographer writes in one of his despatches, "the only strong man in Ireland," and was at one time "so strong and perilous" that Sydney warned Lord Burghley that, unless this formidable insurgent and crafty political conspirer were speedily put down, the queen would lose Ireland, as her sister had lost Calais. The force "this monstrous monarchal

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