After such a trial O’Neill felt that the command to proceed to London covered a plot to get rid of him altogether. London held a grim keep called the Tower, familiar to the owners of Irish estates, whither scores of chieftains had been lured aforetime. His experience disinclined him to make the pilgrimage. He knew that the Deputy had clouded the King’s mind with suspicions as to his loyalty, and he brooded over some earlier essays to compass his assassination. The dungeon or the scaffold was, he feared, to end the trip to Court. An estate so unwholesomely extensive as his forbade much hope of justice. The partition of Sir Con O’Neill’s patrimony in Claneboy was not two years old, and the alliance between Hamilton, who contrived it, and the Deputy, who abetted it, remained in full force. The Earl, therefore, came to the conclusion that he was a doomed man, whether he went to London or whether he remained at home. He took counsel at Mellifont with Sir Garret Moore (who had persuaded him to sign the treaty of 1603), and resolved to go into exile. Then he bade farewell to Moore, and having also taken leave of the Deputy at Slane, O’Neill, in September, 1607, sailed for France from Rathmullen, with Maguire, Lord of Fermanagh, O’Donnell, Earl of Tirconnell, and their kinsfolk. Such was the terror of Chichester that they were denied water for their ship in one creek in Donegal. Bards and Brehons have lamented that these Gaelic lords did not hold their ground. Their critics have not explained whether the Earl of Tyrone should have gone to London and risked being mewed up in the Tower, or have disobeyed the order and resisted arrest without an army to back him. The victim himself, living and acting in days when he could measure and appreciate the consequences of obedience or revolt, decided on flight. It may not have been a heroic course, but it was a decision taken by a seasoned captain, who had faced death on a score of battlefields, and whose deeds of daring still rang throughout Europe. CHAPTER VIII. UPROOTING THE NOBLES. Chichester had a second plan in reserve to undo O’Neill in case his London plot should miscarry. One of his creatures called Weston, whom he employed as a collector or farmer of “fines and amerciaments,” claimed to hold a mortgage on the Earl’s fisheries in the Bann and on those of O’Donnell in Lough Foyle. The Attorney-General certified that O’Donnell had “suffered a recovery” in a suit against him by Weston in 1605. O’Cahan was also registered as being in Weston’s toils. The Deputy’s reckoning was that, if the design to send O’Neill to the Tower failed, he could decree a foreclosure of his estate, or at least of the fisheries. The news of the Flight of the Earls reached him as unlooked-for good tidings. At one blow the great Ulster chiefs were got rid of, and with them away the lesser thanes could easily be dispatched or despoiled.