The old man did not know then which of these two sons to be proudest of. It was a grim satisfaction to the Earl, after all that had passed, when “Kynal” had been buried in Lismore Church, to sit down and make that entry in his diary: “Six of the rebell ensignes were carried to his widdoe.”[109] Robyn was to hear from his father once or twice after that. The Earl held out brave hopes of being able to procure some “office” for his boy “at his coming over.” And he sent his own “choice dun mare” to Lismore, with orders that it was to be “kept and drest carefully” for Robyn, when God should send him home again. And when Broghill’s wife, “Lady Pegg,” was at last obliged to return to England, the old Earl gave her a commission to buy for him a ring “besett rownd with diamonds,” and to present it, from him, to her fair young cousin the little Lady Ann Howard, whom he thought of always, even in those dark days, as “my Robyn’s yonge Mrs.” There is something Shakespearean in the mood in which this old fighter lived his last months and drew his last breath. Shut up in Youghal, “preserving” that town for his King, his sons away fighting, his daughters and grandchildren scattered, Kynalmeaky and Barrymore dead, and poor Lettice dying,[110] his lands despoiled, his fortune vanished, he was still the great Earl of Cork, the head of a great family, the old man of action and experience, the Elizabethan soldier-statesman to whom the younger men, statesmen and kinsmen alike, turned in this hour of extremity, and not in vain. There is nothing stronger or more human of its kind, or more characteristic of the man, than the positively last will and testament made by himself in Youghal so late as November 1642, ten months before his death.[111] The end came, nobody knows exactly when, but about the very time of the signing of the truce at Sigginstown, in the middle of September 1643, “from infirmities incident to old age, and the want of rest and quiet.” He was buried in the great tomb at Youghal. All his life he had believed in three things: in God’s Providence, his own integrity of purpose, and the righteousness of a Cause. And in the debacle—in his and Ireland’s darkest moment, when the clouds hung low over his native land and the land of his adoption—his belief in these three things remained unmoved. Shakespeare has told us how Faith and Uncertainty go hand in hand— “If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now: if it be not now, yet it will come....” CHAPTER VIII IN ENGLAND AGAIN “And though his boiling youth did often very earnestly solicit to be employed in those culpable delights that are useful[112] in and seem so proper for that season, and have repentance adjourned till old age, yet did its importunities meet ever with denials, Philaretus ever esteeming that piety was to be embraced not so much to gain heaven, as to serve God with....”—ROBERT BOYLE’S _Philaretus_.