king that visited Ireland, was moved by the spirit of the country. The temper he had shown thirteen years before in the Peasant Revolt--“I am your King and Lord, good people; what will ye?”--manifested itself again amid the troubles of his Irish lordship. To the Irish people he showed the first signs of sympathy and respect. Laying aside the hostile banners of England, he substituted the golden cross and silver birds of his patron saint, Edward the Confessor--the only King of England reported to have any connection with an Irish house, if as some historians say (on what evidence I do not know) his Queen’s sister Driella was wife of O’Brien, king of Munster. “To Us and our Council,” he wrote to England, “it appears that the Irish rebels have rebelled in consequence of the injustice and grievances practised towards them, for which they have been afforded no redress.” Peace was made with “his rebel MacMorrough”; and treaties signed with the chiefs, seventy-five of them, were sent to England in two hampers, while Richard returned to Westminster leaving Roger Mortimer, heir to the throne, as Viceroy. The next year, as we have seen, he received O’Carroll of Ely at his palace with especial honour. With his disappearance the policy of peace and reform came to an end. The meaning of Mortimer’s rule was clear to the Irish. He claimed by inheritance of Lionel Duke of Clarence, son of Edward III., to be Earl of Ulster, Lord of Connacht, Trim, Leix, and Ossory, thus threatening the Ulster chiefs with a war of conquest, and the lord of Offaly and the middle Irish with the complete encircling of their lands, their isolation and destruction. Edmund Mortimer, son-in-law of Clarence, had already appeared as Viceroy (1380-1381), carrying with him the sword adorned with gold “which had belonged to the good king Edward” the Confessor, and his great bed of black satin embroidered with the arms of de Mortimer and Ulster: he sent much spoil and cattle to England, and died in the midst of his warfare. His son Roger was appointed Viceroy (1382-1383) a boy of ten; and orders were sent to arrest all those who by land or water should send or sell horses, salt, armour, iron, gold, silver, corn, or other provisions, to any of the Irish. Once more this same Roger Mortimer was Viceroy in 1395, riding to war for his inheritance in the dress and arms of an Irish chief. Calvagh captured the earl of Kildare who was held to ransom by his father; and the Carlow men routed and slew the young Mortimer himself (1398). On which Richard sent over his half-brother, the Duke of Surrey (1398), and already forgetful of his Irish compacts of three years before, granted his favourite lands which by treaty belonged to MacMurchadh. When war naturally followed the king proposed to subdue the Irish by a new visit (1399), this time forsaking the tradition of the Confessor for that of Henry II., and bearing the royal regalia of England and the miraculous consecrated oil of St.