A letter to Captaine George Carye: Wee have bin certified by a letter from the Mayour of Dartmouth and certaine others of the chief inhabitants of that towne what paynes you have taken of late among them to make the said inhabitants of that town expert and serviceable for their owne defence, if occasion shall require; both by your own instruccions and good discipline and by the example of the company of old soldiers under your charge and there as yeat remayning, whom you do cause to be often trayned and exercised amongst them. This course by you taken wee cannot but very well allow and commende, and as the inhabitants themselves have by their letter acknowledged themselves beholding to you for your paynes, so we do also give you thanckes in respect that you do therein her Majestie good service, praying and requiring you to contynew the same during your aboade there.

In the spring of 1599 he was ordered to Ireland with his company as part of Essex's army. He took part in the fruitless pasiar of that army through southern Ireland and was present at the storming of Thomas Butler's castle of Cahir on May 25, 1599, when he was wounded in the face. That feat of arms was reported by Essex as follows:1

In the night the rebels attempted to save their lives by sally, but they were so well received by Sir Charles Percie and Sir Christopher St. Lawrence that very few escaped and only those by swimming. The castle was immediately entered. The cannon and culverins drawn into it and the breaches repaired. Captain George Carye who had been wounded in the face, was left in command of it with his company of 100 foot.

1 Cal. Carew MSS. (1589-1600), 301.

Elizabeth's comment to Essex on this adventure in her famous letter of July 19, which subsequently figured at Essex's trial, is characteris

tic:

Full well do we know that you would long since have scorned to have allowed it for any great matter in others to have taken an Irish hold from a rabble of rogues with such force as you had and with the help of the cannon, which was always able in Ireland to make his passage where it pleased.1

more.

Of young George Cary's fate we know nothing He was knighted by Essex' and died soon after, perhaps of the effects of his wound received at Cahir, perhaps in some other obscure skirmish of that futile campaign. He gave his life like many another English soldier of birth and breeding in the centuries to come: an inconspicuous sacrifice for the establishment of the British empire beyond the seas.

1 Elizabeth would have taken more comfort in the report of a later capture of Cahir. See Cromwell's despatch from Ireland of March 5, 1649 (Carlyle, Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, ii, 233): “It pleaseth God still to enlarge your interest here. The Castle of Cahir, very considerable built upon a rock and seated in an island in the midst of the Suir, was lately rendered to me. It cost the earl of Essex, as I am informed, about eight weeks siege with his army and artillery. It is now yours without the loss of one man."

Cahir (whose name arose from the same Celtic root as Cary) dates from 1142, still stands between Clonmel and Tipperary, and is used by Essex's and Cromwell's successors in the twentieth century as a military barracks to awe a country still unreconciled to English rule.

2 The Visitation of 1620, Vivian, 151.

Essex's expedition had accomplished nothing but the destruction of Essex's reputation and the waste of an English army. After a mysterious interview with Tyrone, Essex himself suddenly returned to Dublin in September and, to the astonishment of every one present, announced to the Irish council that he was returning to England; whereupon, in accordance with instructions from the queen, he appointed Archbishop Loftus, the chancellor of Ireland, and Sir George Cary, as lords justices, to administer the government in his absence.1

And so Robert Devereux, abandoning his responsibility, rushed to meet his swiftly approaching and tragical fate. On February 25, 1601, he died on the block in the Tower of London, the victim of his own folly and the inexorable pride of a selfish old woman.2

Archbishop Loftus and Cary were confirmed in their appointment as lords justices by letter of

1 Cal. Carew MSS. (1589-1600), 335.

2 The story of Essex's fall is one of the classics of English history. Nowhere has it been told better or with more acute analysis of motive, during the Irish expedition and afterwards, than in Spedding's Life of Francis Bacon, ii, chaps. 6-10. Weak as was his character, one cannot help being profoundly affected by Essex's fate: if only for that noble passage in his cross-examination of Sir Fernando Gorges at the trial, in which he bids the witness, whom he had every right to believe was his friend, to remember that he is a gentleman, to speak like a man and to tell the truth. But Gorges, like Francis Bacon, had deserted his patron, after battening on his favor in the days of prosperity, and lied away Essex's life to save his own, as no one doubted who was present. The colloquy is given in Jardine, Criminal Trials, i, 334.