As has been said, the rebels became masters of the principal towns in the North without meeting any check, when they attacked Mellifont. Lord Moore was then in Drogheda with Sir Henry Tichburne, the Governor, with whose policy and methods he, both before and afterwards, identified himself; and, as an active agent of the Lords Justices, he was specially odious to the Irish. During the siege of Drogheda, he more than once, by his alertness and personal bravery, saved the town from falling into the hands of the besiegers. With the exception of Lord Moore and a few of the older families, both the Lords Justices themselves (who governed the country in the absence of the Lord Lieutenant), and their ruthless instruments were men of no fortune; or, were such as became enriched by the plunder of the Irish. Tichburne, in a letter to his lady, alludes to one of the commissions entrusted to him for execution, in which fiendish work Lord Moore was associated with him. After his return from the burning of Dundalk,[9] which he left a smouldering heap of ruins, he describes the results:--"There was neither man nor beast to be found in sixteen miles, between the two towns of Drogheda and Dundalk; nor on the other side of Dundalk, in the County of Monaghan, nearer than Carrickmacross, a strong pile twelve miles distant" (Tichburne's _Siege of Drogheda_, p. 320). And in the same page he says, all this magnificent ruin and desolation were inflicted on the peasantry "without one penny of charge to the State, and that for the space of seven months, all under his command subsisted on the spoils" taken from the unfortunate people in that district. "The country and fields about Dundalk," he says, "were abounding in corn, which I allocated to the several companies, etc." The ghosts of the Bann must have been glutted with vengeance!!!