'For your more satisfaction we have thought good to signify unto you, that by all your actions, your wise behaviour and constancy in them, your pains and travels sustained by yourself bodily, the great charge that you have been at in your private expenses, and consuming of your revenues and patrimony in our service, and for the attaining of honour by virtue and travail, we have great cause to think you a rare treasure of our realm and a principal ornament of our nobility; we wish daily unto God we had many such; and are sorry that in anything you should be discouraged.... What success soever your enterprise shall have we must needs have a great good opinion of you as a thankful prince ought to have; whereof you may be bold to assure yourself, and all such your friends as would be glad thereof, which be, you may be bold, for your rare virtues and noble courage, a great number.'[296] [Sidenote: He sets out towards Tyrone.] In his delight at this letter, and notwithstanding the doubtful tenour of Maltby's instructions, Essex sought a reconciliation with Fitzwilliam. Both professed to bear no personal resentment, and to have quarrelled only on public grounds, but others could see that their animosity was of long standing and proportionately difficult to appease. The Earl was sanguine that now at last he was on the high road to success. 'I would not,' he confessed, 'blame the Queen if she were weary of Ireland ... it is certain her Highness has spent 600,000_l._ in her time here and the realm never the better; but, trust me, sir, reformation was never thoroughly intended until now, as I think.' Full of hope he set forward towards the Blackwater, having already employed 600 labourers to cut passes through the woods bordering on Tyrone, where the people, since his devastating raid in the previous autumn, had been living altogether on flesh. 'They have been occupied with raids and incursions this sowing time, and their next harvest shall be by all likelihood twice as urgent, and therefore it is certain that they must either starve or obey very shortly.'[297] [Sidenote: The Queen again changes her mind.]