Catalogue description SIR ROBERT CECYLL to the LORD DEPUTY (RUSSELL).

By divers packets you have represented the confused state of that kingdom, and that her Majesty should provide for the worst. "When it shall appear that this merciful course of hers taketh no place," she will use other means. Connaught should be well compounded, and so Ulster thereby more assured. It is better to temporize than to be driven to the charge of new armies, the victualling of which is very difficult. Otherwise it were a paradox to believe that the army (being 6,000 or 7,000) should not have suppressed the rebellion. Her Majesty attends the issue of this great army in Spain.

As for the cessation of arms, and treaties of peace, which you note to be prejudicial, her Majesty adopted that course upon your own advertisements, that you could not suppress the rebels. You and the Council represented that Ireland might be settled by pacification. "I think it had been a counsel well followed." You wrote that plain necessity, after your forces were harassed in a journey into Ulster, moved you to agree to a cessation. Had you written in mislike of the cessation, and undertaken the ending of the war, with any reasonable propositions, I assure you "that both her Majesty and her Council were most greedy of that honorable course by force to have reduced them;" but she notes that you are only advertisers, and not advisers. She requires you to restrain this coming over of Irish servitors and suitors, whereby her person and her Council are pestered, as they might be despatched by yourself in that kingdom.

"There is another matter wherein her Majesty is contented your Lp. use your own wisdom; not as seeming to have any authority from her. One Captain Thomas Ley doth pretend he could do much to cure these needless jealousies in the Earl of Tyrone, which keep him from repairing to the State, and that he would sue for leave to come into England; a thing which the Queen hath no reason to refuse, although it is not fit that she should desire it."

All this is in answer to your last packet of 29 June, with divers others. I have noted by a postscript in a letter of yours to your noble sister, that you retain an opinion of my constant poor goodwill towards you. "I shall never be found so gross or injurious as in any kind to raise the reputation of any other, whom you think I do also affect, to the least prejudice of your Lp.'s reputation, or darkening of that superiority which her Majesty hath given you without exception over any subject or servant of hers in that kingdom." I refer you to my Lord my father's writing concerning matters of money. We are so far from advising any diminution of forces, "as order is taken to send over that remain of horse of the Clergie unsent over."

From the Court, 10 July 1596.

Received the 24th, by Marviliack.

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 245.