As a mover of disturbance on a large scale there succeeded James Fitzmaurice, kinsman of the Earl of Desmond, the head of the southern sept of Geraldines. Fitzmaurice, whether from conviction or policy, gave rebellion a more religious character and connected it with Rome and Madrid, which he visited on missions of intrigue. In this work he had a compeer in Stukely, an adventurer of the kind then common, who also intrigued with the Catholic powers. If their aim was an Irish crown on a Catholic head, it came to nothing. But Fitzmaurice brought with him to Ireland a regular proclamation from the Pope, and had made formidable headway in his appeal to the forces of disorder when he was killed. The leadership of the movement passed to the Earl of Desmond, who with a little aid from Spain raised in Munster a rebellion on a large scale. He was a feeble though respectable leader, and his rising in the end bore no fruits but a renewal of slaughter and devastation. The aid of Rome and Spain promised to the Irish Catholics was long in coming. Ever tardy and vacillating was the mind of the Spanish king. But at the time of Desmond's rebellion the aid came. In concert with the insurgent Irish a force of Italians and Spaniards landed and established itself in a fortalice at Smerwick. The deputy at that time was Lord Grey, a Puritan most pronounced and militant, the Artegal, the Knight of Justice, in Spenser's "Faerie Queene," bent on the overthrow of the false Duessa and the extermination of her brood. He invested Smerwick. The Irish allies of the invader failed to relieve the place, and the garrison was compelled to surrender at discretion. Grey then butchered the whole of them in cold blood. Raleigh, as the officer in command, it is to be feared directed the slaughter. Alva or Parma would have done the same, and Elizabeth in approving incurred no special infamy. The poor Irish in this rebellion showed that fidelity to a chief which was one of their small stock of political virtues. They afterwards showed their love of legend, of melancholy legend especially, by telling that Desmond's ghost, mounted on a phantom steed with silver shoes, rose at night from the water on the bank of which he had been slain, and fancying that in the moaning of the wind they heard the Desmond howl. The attainder of the Earl of Desmond was followed by the sweeping confiscation of a vast tract of land to the Crown, on the assumption that as the domain of an earl it had been a fief and the property of its lord; whereas under native law and according to native ideas it was the property of the tribe. Spenser was one of the grantees of the Crown and settlers on the conquered land. He had been the secretary of Lord Grey. The author of the "Faerie Queene" thus encountered the religion of the false Duessa, his hatred of which was not likely to be diminished when he was afterwards by a great outbreak of insurrection ejected from his grant.