Page:Irish minstrelsy, vol 2 - Hardiman.djvu/173

Francis Cosby, a person of slender fortune in England, betook himself to Ireland as an adventurer, in the reign of Queen Mary. He directed his course to the territory of Leix, recently converted into Shire-ground by the name of the Queen's County, and the scene of the horrid massacre of Mullamast. Having recommended himself to the attention of the chief governor, he was, by patent dated 10 Sept. 1558, appointed "general" of the "Kerne," as the then police was called, after the ancient Irish foot-soldiers. Of these, "General" Cosby had 32 under his immediate command, and with their assistance, he performed prodigies of valour against the defenceless natives, on whom he was authorized to exercise Martial law, and inflict capital punishment, at pleasure. The gallows became his favourite implement of death, as the cheapest mode of despatching the surrounding proprietory, and he, accordingly, had one erected near his house in the neighbourhood of Stradbally Abbey, upon a spot, to this day called Gallows-hill. Here he kept up a continual scene of execution for many years, hanging the people in numbers, and not unfrequently suspending them alive in chains, with loaves of bread placed before them, in order to render their death more painful. These necessary severities, as they were called, became a sure passport to the further favourable notice of government; and Sir Henry Sydney, Lord Deputy, in his State papers, reported, that it was needless to make Leix Shire-ground, so great and successful was the care of Francis Cosby and some others, in preserving the public tranquillity; but the Deputy might have added, in the quaint pedantry of his day, ubi solitudinem faciunt tranquillitatem appellant. The tranquillizer, however, was richly rewarded for his "zeal and services against the Irish," by several grants of lands in the new Shire-ground, made to him and his wife, Elizabeth Palmes, by the Queen. Having reached the age of 70 years, he was at length slain by the natives, in a battle of which Camden gives the following account, in his life of Queen Elizabeth.—"When Arthur,