Page 187 - Demo

Chapter Six 187 ding of the English, for his head was sent to Dublin Castle where it was impaled on a spike
above the castle gates.
Shane’s Head
(A poem by John Savage)
A clansman of Shane the Proud’s stands outside the gates of Dublin Castle and addresses the spiked head:
Is it thus, O Shane the haughty! Shane the valiant! That we meet- Have my eyes been lit by Heaven but to guide me to defeat?
Have I no chief and you no clan to give us both defence?
Or must I, too, be statued here with thy cold eloquence.
Thy ghastly head grins scorn upon old Dublin’s Castle-tower,
Thy shaggy hair is wind-tossed, and thy brow seems rough with power; Thy wrathful lips, like sentinels, by foulest treachery stung,
Look rage upon the world of wrong, but chain thy iery tongue.
Just think, O Shane! The same moon shines on Lifey as on Foyle, And lights the ruthless knaves in both, our kinsmen to despoil; And you the hope, voice, battle-axe, the shiled of us and ours,
A murdered, trunkless, blinding sight above these Dublin towers.
Described variously as being “a very generous man but cruel man. a man who ruled his own people with justice and consideration, although in his dealings with the English he matched craft with craft,” Shane the Proud O’Neill was only 35 years of age at the time of his death. In the aftermath, the English allowed a distant cousin of his, Turlough Lynagh O’Neill to rule the O’Neill lands until such time as Matthew’s son, Hugh, still in London, should be suiciently anglicized to be entrusted to hold them as the ‘Queen’s faithful vassal.’
As already mentioned, much enmity and jealousy existed between the Butlers and Fitzgeralds. In 1565, the year that Shane the Proud defeated the Scots of Antrim, the But- lers and Munster Geraldines met in bloody battle at the Ford of Afane , on the river Finisk, near Cappoquin, county Waterford. Instigated in the main by the Geraldines, this ‘Battle of