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Updated: June 16, 2025
O'Donnell must have landed the greater part of his men, for Brian's force was being held in check, though they had swept in among the brush huts. Over the tumult Brian heard the piercing voice of the Dark Master, and with a flame of rage hot in his mind he sped forward and found himself confronted by a yelling mass of O'Donnells. Then fell a sterner battle than any Brian had waged.
In those days it was no small thing to own such cannon in the west of Ireland, and Brian eyed them approvingly as he passed through the courtyard. He was beginning to count them as his own. Cathbarr had told him that the Dark Master had brought many O'Donnells down from the north to settle the farms and lands beyond the castle, but Brian saw that these were not all.
It never was more, however, than a nominal ownership, the clutch of the O'Neills and O'Donnells being found practically impossible to unloose, so that all the De Burghs could be said to hold were the southern borders of what are now the counties of Down, Monaghan, and Antrim.
The O'Donnells drew back momentarily, and in the brief pause Brian saw the figure of the Dark Master by the starboard rail in the waist, aiming up at him with a pistol, while two men behind him were hastily charging others. Cathbarr saw the action also, and hastily flung Brian aside, but too late.
A few weeks later a party of English soldiers were surprised by the O'Byrnes in Wicklow, and fled shamefully; while almost at the same moment by a misfortune which was certainly no fault of Essex's, but which went to swell the list of his disasters Sir Conyers Clifford, the gallant governor of Connaught, was defeated by the O'Donnells in a skirmish among the Curlew mountains, and both he and Sir Alexander Ratcliffe, the second in command, left dead upon the field.
Perkin appealed to him as early as 1492; and before the pretender's expedition sailed, Tyrconnel, chief of the O'Donnells of the north-west of Ireland, presented himself in Scotland to renew the appeal. The antagonism of Scottish feeling to the ruling powers in England was chronic.
The most striking illustration of the struggles of this description, which occurs in our Annals in the fifteenth century, is that which was waged for three generations between a branch of the O'Conors established at Sligo, calling themselves "lords of Lower Connaught," and the O'Donnells of Donegal.
A fresh surge of the wild O'Donnells bore down on Brian's party, and as they did so a man rose up from among the wounded and stabbed at Brian with his skean. Brian kicked the arm aside, but slipped in blood and snow and went down; as a yell shrilled up from the pirates, Cathbarr leaped forward over him, swinging his ax mightily.
Accordingly, when a representative of the Spanish O'Donnells actually appeared at Limerick, bearing as we know many of his family have done, even to our day, the unmistakable red mark of the ancient Tyrconnell line, immense numbers of the country people who had held aloof from the Jacobite cause, obeyed the voice of prophecy, and flocked round the Celtic deliverer.
Thinking that the Dark Master would be in the castle, he and Cathbarr took a hundred men for that attack, ordering the rest to get as close to the camp as might be, but not to attack until he had struck on the castle, and to cut off the O'Donnells from their ships. Then, assured that the plan was understood, he and Cathbarr loaded their pistols and set out with the hundred.
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