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In this fastness Fitzmaurice continued to maintain himself, until a prospect of new combinations opened to him in the West. The sons of the Earl of Clanrickarde, though released from the custody of Sidney, receiving intimation that they were to be arrested at a court which Fitton, President of Connaught, had summoned at Galway, flew to arms and opened negotiations with Fitzmaurice.
The Assembly, which met at Jamestown in August, and again at Loughrea in November, 1650, made the retirement of Ormond from the Government a condition of all future efforts in the royal cause, and that nobleman, deeply wounded by this condition, had finally sailed from Galway, in December, leaving to Clanrickarde the title of Lord Deputy, and to Castlehaven the command of the forces which still kept the field.
The Earls of Thomond and Clanrickarde were actively engaged with their followers, and their loss could hardly have been less than that of the English regulars.
Of 1,100 secular priests, and 750 regulars, still left, only sixty-nine had signed the Clanrickarde House Remonstrance. An incident of this same year 1666 illustrates more forcibly than description could do, the malignant feeling which had been excited in England against everything Irish.
Lord Digby, who had accompanied him, after an unsuccessful attempt to cajole the Synod of Waterford, made the best of his way back to France; the Marquis of Clanrickarde, who had also been of the expedition, shared the flight of Ormond. Towards the middle of September, O'Neil's army, after capturing Roscrea Castle, marched to Kilkenny, and encamped near that city.
The treaty, thus concluded at the end of March, was to lie as an escroll in the hands of the Marquis of Clanrickarde till the 1st of May, awaiting Sir Kenelm Digby with the Roman protocol.
Among his other titles he held that of Lord of Connaught, which he conveyed to his relative, Richard de Burgo, the son or grandson of William Fitz-Aldelm de Burgo, about the year 1225. And this brings us to relate how the house of Clanrickarde rose upon the flank of the house of O'Conor, and after holding an almost equal front for two generations, finally overshadowed its more ancient rival.
Against the force thus collected, Sligo could not hope to contend, and soon, from that town, as from a rallying and resting place, 2,000 horsemen were daily launched upon the adjoining country. Lord Clanrickarde, the royal president of the province, as unpopular as trimmers usually are in times of crisis, was unable to make head against this new danger.
But the zeal of the Archbishop of Tuam, and the violence of the Governor of Galway, Sir Francis Willoughby, proved more than a counterpoise for the authority of Clanrickarde and the recollection of Strafford: Connaught, though the last to come into the Confederation, was also the last to abandon it.
Mountgarrett and Bishop Rothe died before Galway fell, and were buried in the capital of the Confederacy; Bishop McMahon of Clogher, surrendered to Sir Charles Coote, and was executed like a felon by one he had saved from destruction a year before at Derry; Coote, after the Restoration, became Earl of Mountrath, and Broghill, Earl of Orrery; Clanrickarde died unnoticed on his English estate, under the Protectorate; Inchiquin, after many adventures in foreign lands, turned Catholic in his old age, and this burner of churches bequeathed an annual alms for masses for his soul; Jones, Corbet, Cook, and the fanatical preacher, Hugh Peters, perished on the scaffold with the other regicides executed by order of the English Parliament; Ormond having shared the evils of exile with the King, shared also the splendour of his restoration, became a Duke, and took his place, as if by common consent, at the head of the peerage of the empire; his Irish rental, which before the war was but 7,000 pounds a year, swelled suddenly on the Restoration to 80,000 pounds; Nicholas French, after some sojourn in Spain, where he was coadjutor to the Archbishop of Saint James, returned to Louvain, where he made his first studies, and there spent the evening of his days in the composition of those powerful pamphlets which kept alive the Irish cause at home and on the continent; a Roman patrician did the honours of sepulture to Luke Wadding, and Cromwell interred James Usher in Westminster Abbey; the heroic defender of Clonmel and Limerick, and the gallant, though vacillating Preston, were cordially received in France; while the consistent republican, Ludlow, took refuge as a fugitive in Switzerland.
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