Thus, you will see, Ireland was left pretty much to herself, during those thirty years of English civil war, in which twelve murderous pitched battles were fought. Most of the old nobility were killed in battle or executed, or otherwise destroyed, and more than one hundred thousand Englishmen of the middle and lower classes were immolated on the smoking altars of family pride and savage ambition. Every prince of the race of Plantagenet was exterminated when, in 1599, Henry VII ordered the beheading of the young Earl of Warwick, son of the Duke of Clarence. Many of the Anglo-Irish lords and their followings took part in the English wars, mainly on the side of the House of York, and the Geraldines, in particular, got sadly mixed up in them, for which they suffered amply in after days. No reigning king of England had set foot in Ireland since Richard II sailed to his death from Dublin, and Henry VII proved to be no exception to the rule. He, however, interfered in the quarrel between the Fitzgeralds and the Butlers—as bitter and prolonged as that between the Camerons and Campbells in Scotland—and made the Earl of Kildare viceroy. The Desmonds, the powerful southern branch of the Geraldines, were also eternally at variance with the Butlers. It is related that, on one occasion, the Earl of Desmond was wounded and made prisoner. While being borne on a litter to Butler’s stronghold, one of the bearers insolently and brutally demanded, “Where is the great Earl of Desmond now?” To which the heroic captive immediately replied—“Where he ought to be” (alluding to the litter in which he was carried by his foes): “still on the necks of the Butlers!”