Note 519 — Chapter XVIII · ON THE CONSTITUTION OF IRELAND

Sidney Papers, 84, 117, etc., to 236; Holingshed, 389; Leland, 261. Sidney was much disappointed at the queen's want of firmness; but it is plain by the correspondence that Walsingham also thought he had gone too far. P. 192. The sum required seems to have been reasonable, about £2000 a year from the five shires of the pale; and, if they had not been stubborn, he thought all Munster also, except the Desmond territories, would have submitted to the payment. P. 183. "I have great cause," he writes, "to mistrust the fidelity of the greatest number of the people of this country's birth of all degrees; they be papists, as I may well term them, body and soul. For not only in matter of religion they be Romish, but for government they will change, to be under a prince of their own superstition. Since your highness' reign the papists never showed such boldness as now they do."—P. 184. This, however, hardly tallies with what he says afterwards (p. 208): "I do believe, for far the greatest number of the inhabitants of the English pale, her highness hath as true and faithful subjects as any she hath subject to the Crown;" unless the former passage refer chiefly to those without the pale, who in fact were exclusively concerned in the rebellions of this reign.