After having succeeded in crushing Desmond and "planting " Munster, the attention of Elizabeth was directed to the 0'Neills and O'Donnells of Ulster. That thrilling history is well known. It is enough to say that O'Donnell from his youth was designedly exasperated by ill-treatment and imprisonment; and that as soon as O'Neill, who had been treated with the greatest apparent kindness by the queen, that he might become a queen's man, showed that he was still an Irishman and a lover of his country, he was marked out as a victim, and all the troops and treasures of England were poured out lavishly to crush him and destroy the royal races of the north. In that gigantic struggle one feature is remarkable--that, whenever the English Government felt obliged to come to terms with the last asserters of Irish independence, the first condition invariably laid down by O'Neill and O'Donnell was the free exercise of the Catholic religion. For we must not lose sight of the well-ascertained fact that the English queen, who at the very commencement of her reign had had her spiritual supremacy acknowledged by the Irish Parliament under pain of forfeiture, praemunire, and high-treason, insisted all along on the binding obligation of this title; and though at first she had secretly promised that this law should not be enforced against the laity, she showed by all her measures that its observance was of paramount importance in her eyes. Had the Irish followed the English as a nation, and accepted Protestantism, Elizabeth would scarcely have made war upon them, nor introduced her "plantations." All along the Irish were "traitors" and "rebels" simply because they chose to remain Catholics, and McGeoghegan has well remarked that, "not- withstanding the severe laws enacted by Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Elizabeth, down to James I., it is a well-established truth that, during that period, the number of Irishmen who embraced the 'reformed religion' did not amount to sixty in a country which at the time contained two millions of souls." And McGeoghegan might have added that, of these sixty, not one belonged to the people; they were all native chieftains who sold their religion in order to hold their estates or receive favors from the queen.