Catalogue description The QUEEN to the LORD LIEUTENANT and COUNCIL of IRELAND.

"The letter which we have received this day of that Council concerning your opinions for the northern action doth rather deserve reproof than much answer." We see you dissuade that which must be done. Courtesies have made it of greater difficulty. You (the Lieutenant) are following the examples of the late Deputies Russell and FitzWilliams. You of that Council have been the cause of that corruption in religion, by favouring Popery; and it was you who persuaded our Lieutenant, on his landing, to make so long a journey into Munster. Now we receive new arguments framed to keep our army out of the North, and thus to increase the rebels' pride. "Do you forget that within these seven days you made a hot demand of 2,000 men for this action, and now, before you have answer, send us tidings that this huge charge must leave Tyrone untouched? What would you have us believe, if we did not think you loyal, but that either some of you cannot forget your old goodwills to that traitor, or else are insensible of all things save your own particulars?" As for Lough Foile, "which still you ring in our ears to be the place that would most annoy the rebels, we doubt not but to hear by the next that it is begun, and not in question."

In answer to the letter from you our Lieutenant, "where you describe unto us how strongly our Presidents of Munster and Connaught (Norris and Clifford) are mustered in those provinces, without doing anything upon the rebels, that Ophally with 1,500 cannot save themselves, that the northern garrisons are able to do nothing with 3,000 men, that within two miles of Dublin there are stealths and incursions; if it grow out of negligence of our governors, it were fit to know it; if otherwise, then we wish they had occupied fewer numbers, seeing that they ran no worse fortune before this great army arrived. And for the places which you have taken, we conceive you will leave no great numbers in them, seeing our provinces where they are seated receive no better fruits of their plantation; nor that we can hope of more success (by the Council's writing) than to be able to keep our towns that were never lost, and some petty holds of small importance, with more than three parts of our army, it being decreed for the head of the rebellion (as it seems by them) that our forces shall not find the way this year to behold them."

"Howsoever you seem to apportion the numbers only of 4,750 foot and 340 horse for the journey of Ulster, yet ought you to reckon the greatest part of the forces of Connaught as one of the portions always designed to correspond that service; to which, if you shall add these 2,000 which we have granted you, with such extractions as upon better consideration you may draw both from divers places that serve rather for protections of private men's countries and fortunes than for the good of the public cause, besides what you may carry out of the frontier northern garrisons (which are near his country), you may not reckon under 10,000 or 11,000 for that service."

"Out of your own letters we may sufficiently gather the small success of your painful endeavours, where we confess our army hath lost no honour under your person; and out of our letters you may collect some sufficient matter to prove that we command you no impossibilities."

Nonesuch, 10 August 1599.

Copy.

Calendar of the Carew Manuscripts preserved in the Archiepiscopal Library at Lambeth, ed. J. S. Brewer & W. Bullen (6 vols., 1867-73, vol. III, document 308.