Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 7.djvu/176

156 REIGN OF ELIZABETH. [CH. 42. signature, when a second dark effort was made to cut the knot of the Irish difficulty. As a first evidence of returning cordiality, a present of wine was sent to Shan from Dublin. It was consumed at his table, but the poison had been unskilfully pre- pared. It brought him and half his household to the edge of death, but no one actually died. Refined chemical analysis was not required to detect the cause of the illness; and Shan clamoured for redress with the fierceness of a man accustomed rather to do wrong than to suffer it. The guilt could not be fixed on Sussex. The crime was traced to an English resident in Dublin named Smith; and if Sussex had been the instigator, his instrument was too faithful to betray him. Yet, after the fatal letter in which the Earl had revealed to Elizabeth his own personal endeavours to procure O'Neil's murder, the suspicion cannot but cling to him that the second attempt was not made without his con- nivance. Nor can Elizabeth herself be wholly acquitted of responsibility. She professed the loudest indig- nation; but she ventured no allusion to his earlier communication with her ; and no hint transpires of any previous displeasure with Sussex's confessions to herself. In its origin and in its close the story is wrapped in mystery. The treachery of an English nobleman, the conduct of the inquiry, and the anomalous termination of it, would have been incredible even in Ireland, were not the original correspondence extant in which the