Note 264 — Chapter XLV

Calendar of S. P. Domestic, Sept. 30 and Dec. 22, 1596; Letters in Carew from Nov. 30 to Dec. 9. On Aug. 10 Tyrone wrote to Russell that he was surprised at his reasonable offer of peace not being accepted; this was a month after his incendiary letter to the Munster chiefs. Russell answered that peace with his sovereign was a ‘proud word,’ and that he was sent to ‘cherish the dutiful and correct the lewd, of which number thou art the ringleader... thy popish shavelings shall not absolve thee’ (MSS. Lansdowne, vol. lxxxiv). Petition of Sir W. Russell in Carew, 1596, No. 253. As to the letters see Burghley to his son Robert, March 30, 1596, in Wright’s Elizabeth and elsewhere. On Oct. 22, 1596, Anthony Bacon wrote to his mother ‘that from Ireland there were cross advertisements from the Lord Deputy on the one side, and Sir John Norris on the other, the first as a good trumpet, sounding continually the alarm against the enemy, the latter serving as a treble viol to invite to dance and be merry upon false hopes of a hollow peace, and that these opposite accounts made many fear rather the ruin than the reformation of the State, upon that infallible ground, quod omne regnum divisum in se dissipabitur’; which sums up the situation very well.—Birch’s Memoirs, ii. 180.