I pass to the time when a sovereign lady filled the throne of England, "the spacious days of great Elizabeth," which were also the period of Ireland's greatest, sternest struggle against a policy of extermination towards her nobles and suppression of her ancient faith. Amid all the heroes and leaders of that wondrous age in Ireland, there appears, like a reincarnation of legendary Medb, a warlike queen in Connacht, Grace O'Malley, "Granuaile" of the ballads. Instead of a chariot, she mounts to the prow of a swift-sailing galley, and sweeps over the wild Atlantic billows, from isle to isle, from coast to coast, taking tribute (or is it plunder?) from the clans. First an O'Flaherty is her husband, then a Norman Burke. In Clare Island they show her castle tower, with a hole in the wall, through which they say she tied a cable from her ship, ready by day or night for a summons from her seamen. She voyaged as far as London town, and stood face to face with the ruffed and hooped Elizabeth, meeting her offer of an English title with the assertion that she was a princess in her own land. The mother of Red Hugh O'Donnell, Ineen-dubh, though daughter of the Scottish Lord of the Isles, was none the less of the old Irish stock. Her character is finely sketched for us by the Franciscan chronicler who wrote the story of the captivity and mighty deeds of her son. When the clans of Tir-Conal assembled to elect the youthful chieftain, he writes: "It was an advantage that she came to the gathering, for she was the head of the advice and counsel of the Cinel-Conail, and, though she was slow and deliberate and much praised for her womanly qualities, she had the heart of a hero and the soul of a soldier." Her daughter, Nuala, is the "woman of the piercing wail" in Mangan's translation of the bard's lament for the death of the Ulster chieftains in Rome. Modern critics like to interpret the "Dark Rosaleen" poem as an expression of Red Hugh's devotion to Ireland, but I think that Rose, O'Doherty's daughter, wife of the peerless Owen Roe, deserves recognition as she whose "Holy delicate white hands should girdle him with steel." The record has come down to us that she prompted and encouraged her husband to return from the low-countries and a position of dignity in a foreign court to command the war in Ireland, and in her first letter, ere she followed him over sea, she asked eagerly: "How stands Tir-Conal?" True daughter of Ulster was Owen's wife, so let us henceforth acknowledge her as the _Roisin_ dubh, "dark Rosaleen", of the sublimest of all patriot songs.