The true beginning of the Irish rally was in the minds of those kings and nobles and fighting men of Thomond and Connacht who marched to the Erne in 1258 to offer the headship of the free Irish to a king of Tir Eoghain. Both O'Brien and O'Connor were closer in the line of descent to kings of Ireland than O'Neill was. There was no country in Europe at that time whose magnates were not willing to have civil war rather than abandon plausible claims to sovereignty. From this worthy beginning I have traced the progress of resurgent Ireland down to a worthy fruition, the generous homage of an Irish queen to that literary tradition which, as Mrs. Green has so clearly shown us in a recent work, is the most characteristic element in Irish nationality. And there I leave the story. Another time of dark adversity came afterwards. What stands for the history of Ireland in that dark time is mainly the history of a government which nobody pretends to have been Irish. We need a new history from the fifteenth century onward, written out of the records of the Irish people. But as I have set down the Irish rally as the subject of this lecture, I may properly be asked how this resurgent movement ended. I shall go as near as I can to imitate the brevity of Sir Robert Savage. The Plantagenets invoked Peter, the Tudors invoked saltpetre. When the Plantagenets undertook to become missionaries in Ireland, and incidentally to pay Peter's Pence, as Giraldus says, out of the profits, they were under the impression that Irish kings had control of secret gold mines. When Elizabeth's ministers professed a yearning to bring the Irish to civility, they were calculating how much land could be acquired by the expenditure of the stock of saltpetre available from time to time at so much per ton. It may shock the proper sense of the "Ireland under" historians that this villainous substance should be blown betwixt the wind and their civility, but just as the true keynote of what is called "Ireland under the Normans" is incastellation, so the true keynote of "Ireland under the Tudors" is gunpowder. There is more mental profit in one fact of this kind than in the painful perusal of stacks of State papers, evidence mainly against those who write them.