signature of the Dublin peace. A very few days later Digby returned from France, where a letter had been received from the King in which he declared that he was no longer free, and that Ormonde was to proceed as before. Digby accordingly publicly declared the Newcastle letter to be a forgery or written under duress. This satisfied the Council, and the peace was proclaimed in Dublin on July 30. On August 3 the Supreme Council at Kilkenny followed suit. 'We require,' they wrote, 'the above proclamation to be printed, and do order and require the same to be published, and due obedience to be given thereunto by all the Confederate Catholics of Ireland.'[88] [Sidenote: Siege of Bunratty, March-July, 1646.] [Sidenote: The castle in its grandeur] [Sidenote: Fight at Sixmilebridge, April 1.] Barnabas O'Brien, sixth Earl of Thomond, had endeavoured to stand neutral during the early years of the war, and to live quietly in Clare. As a Protestant his natural leaning was to Ormonde, who could not protect him; and in October 1644 the Kilkenny assembly, treating neutrals as enemies, ordered his tenants to pay no rent, and took steps to sequestrate his vast estates for the benefit of the Confederacy. Finding his position intolerable, Thomond surrendered Bunratty to the Parliament in March 1646, and soon went himself to England. A Parliamentary fleet under Penn lay in the Shannon, and there was no difficulty about putting a garrison of 700 men under Colonel MacAdam into Bunratty Castle, which lies upon the estuary of the Ogarney river. It is now the most melancholy of ruins; but Rinuccini, who beheld it in its days of grandeur, thought it the finest thing he had ever seen, and Bellings's description bears him out. 'It is,' he says, 'a noble structure, reputed strong when engines of battery were not so frequent, and before time and experience had brought the art of taking in places to perfection. On the south it hath the river of the Shannon, distant from it about a mile of marsh and meadow ground. On the east it is washed by the river which falling to the Shannon at the end of a goodly plain, ebbs and flows with it. To the north at some distance from the castle it is environed with an eminent ridge of earth, which bounds a goodly park, save that it wanted the ornament of timber trees; it was then stored with the largest deer in the kingdom.' Glamorgan, who was now entirely in the nuncio's hands, went to Limerick and busied himself about preparations for the recovery of Bunratty; but the garrison were at first successful. A party of Irish, consisting of 120 horse and 300 foot, came from Sixmilebridge and burned a few houses, but were routed by a sally and lost eighty men, their commander, Captain Magrath, and his lieutenant, being taken prisoners. In the afternoon of the same day the victors, amounting to fifty horse and 600 foot, went to Sixmilebridge and attacked the Irish camp. About 1400 men were strongly