Danvers, with Captains Taaffe and Fleming, came up to their assistance, when, at length, the Irish infantry fell into confusion and fled. Another body of them, under Tyrrell, was still unbroken, and long maintained their ground on a hill, but at length, seeing their comrades routed, they also gave way and retreated in good order after their main body. The northern cavalry covered the retreat, and O’Neill and O’Donnell, by amazing personal exertions, succeeded in preserving order and preventing it from becoming a total rout.” Such was the unfortunate battle of Kinsale—the most disastrous, perhaps, in Irish annals. It was not even well fought, because the Irish troops, surprised in their sleep, owing to lack of vigilance on the part of the sentinels, had lost most of their effective arms, their baggage, and colors at the outset. Their camp, also, came into immediate possession of the enemy. Thus, they were discouraged—the Irish character being mercurial, like the French—if not badly demoralized, and they did not, in this ill-fated action, fight with a resolution worthy of the fame they had rightfully earned as soldiers of the first class, nor did they faithfully respond, as heretofore, to the military genius of their justly renowned leaders. They were mostly the troops of Ulster, far from home, and lacking the inspiration that comes to all men when conscious that they are fighting to defend their own hearths against the spoiler. Ulster, in that day, was almost alien to the southern province, although the soldiers of both were fighting in a common cause. Kinsale was, certainly, not a battle to which Ireland can look back with feelings of pride, but she may be thankful that there are few such gloomy failures recorded in her military annals. Yet the bitter fact remains that Kinsale clouded forever the glory achieved by the troops of O’Neill and O’Donnell on so many fields of victory. The Spaniards, who had joined O’Donnell on the march, refused to fly and were almost all destroyed. Their commander, Del Campo, two officers, and forty soldiers were all that survived out of seven hundred men, and they were made prisoners of war. (Mitchel.) In a note, this author, quoting Pacata Hibernia, says: “The most merciless of all Mountjoy’s army that day was the Anglo-Irish and Catholic Earl of Clanricarde. He slew twenty of the Irish with his own hand, and cried aloud to ‘spare no rebels.’ Carew (the English general and writer) says that ‘no man did bloody his sword more than his lordship that day.’” This episode shows how well Mountjoy’s policy of “Divide and Conquer” and temporary toleration of the Catholics worked for the English cause. Had the penal laws not been mitigated this Anglo-Irish and Catholic Earl of Clanricarde would have fought on the side of Ireland.