From a few fragments we can only guess what wealth was once stored up in Lecale. Wars of Irish and English raged round a harbour so important, as the chiefs of Ulster pressed down against the strangers over a land which had once at Dun Lethglasse held a chief fort of old Ulster kings. O’Neill burned Ardglass of the d’Artois house in 1433: in 1453 Henry O’Neill of Clannaboy was driven back from the town by the help of a Dublin fleet. At the close of the fifteenth century the English almost disappeared out of Lecale. Garrett the Great, Earl of Kildare (1477-1513), claimed Ardglass and the lands about it as heir through his mother to d’Artois, and gained supremacy there--a part of the far-seeing policy by which the house of Kildare was gradually widening its influence from sea to sea, from Ardglass to Sligo and the lower Shannon. His son Garrett Oge had, by grant of Henry VIII. (1514), the customs of Strangford and Ardglass, to be held by service of one red rose annually; and still after four centuries heirs of the Fitzgerald house remain at the entrance of Strangford Lough. After the revolt of this Garrett’s son, Silken Thomas (1535), the English marched through the country, burning Lecale. The fall of the Kildares, allies and relatives of the O’Neills, brought a revival of the O’Neill wars for Ardglass, and of the English campaigns. Lord Leonard Grey has left a description in the State Papers (III. 155) of his expedition in 1539: “and so with the host we set forward into the said country and took all the castles there and delivered them to Mr. Treasurer who hath warded the same ... the said Lecayll is environed round about with the sea and no way to go by land into said country but only by the castle of Dundrome.... I assure your lordship I have been in many places and countries in my days and yet did I never see for so much a pleasanter plot of ground than the said Lecayll, for the commodity of the land and divers islands in the same environed with the sea which were soon reclaimed and inhabited....”