when Ireland was in a state of anarchy and confusion—when the Desmonds and the Tyrones were trying the chances of insurrection rather than abdicate their unlicensed but ancient chieftainship, and the half-civilised people were encouraged in their disobedience to the law by the mischievous activity of the Catholic clergy, who had been forcibly dispossessed of their benefices, and therefore wished to free themselves from the English yoke—Sir Edward Fitton was sent over to Ireland by Queen Elizabeth to fill the difficult and responsible post of first Lord President of the Council within the Province of Munster and Thomond—an office he held for a period of over three years. His position can hardly be said to have been an enviable one, for the country at that time had become so wasted by war and military executions, and famine and pestilence, that two years previously Sir Henry Sidney, the viceroy, in his letters to Elizabeth, described the southern and western counties as “an unmeasurable tract, now waste and uninhabited, which of late years was well tilled and pastured.” He adds,— A more pleasant nor a more desolate land I never saw than from Youghall to Limerick.... So far hath that policy, or rather lack of policy, in keeping dissension among them prevailed, as now, albeit all that are alive would become honest and live in quiet, yet are there not left alive in those two provinces the twentieth person necessary to inhabit the same. And the description is confirmed by a contemporary writer—a Cheshire man, by the way, whose early life was spent in the neighbourhood of Gawsworth (Hollinshead)—who thus expresses the truth with hyperbolical energy:— The land itself, which before those wars was populous, well inhabited, and rich in all the good blessings of God, being plenteous of corn, full of cattle, well stored with fruits and sundry other good commodities, is now become waste and barren, yielding no fruits, the pastures no cattle, the fields no corn, the air no birds, the seas, though full of fish, yet to them yielding nothing. Finally, every way, the curse of God was so great, and the land so barren, both of man and beast, that whosoever did travel from one end unto the other he should not meet any man, woman, or child, saving in towns and cities; nor yet see any beast but they were wolves, the foxes, and other like ravenous beasts.