The triumph of the Crown at home was doubled by its triumph in the great dependency which had so long held the English authority at bay, across St.George's Channel.

Though Henry the Seventh had begun the work of bridling Ireland he had no strength for exacting a real submission; and the great Norman lords of the Pale, the Butlers and Geraldines, the De la Poers and the Fitzpatricks, though subjects in name, remained in fact defiant of the royal authority.

In manners and outer seeming they had sunk into mere natives; their feuds were as incessant as those of the Irish septs; and their despotism combined the horrors of feudal oppression with those of Celtic anarchy.

Crushed by taxation, by oppression, by misgovernment, plundered alike by native marauders and by the troops levied to disperse them, the wretched descendants of the first English settlers preferred even Irish misrule to English "order," and the border of the Pale retreated steadily towards Dublin.

The towns of the seaboard, sheltered by their walls and their municipal self-government, formed the only exceptions to the general chaos; elsewhere throughout its dominions the English Government, though still strong enough to break down any open revolt, was a mere phantom of rule.