It was 'as it were overwhelmed with vagabonds; plunder and spoils daily carried out of it; the people miserable; not two gentlemen in the whole of it able to lend 20 l.; without horse, armour, apparel, or victual.

The soldiers were worse than the people: so beggarlike as it would abhor a general to look on them; never a married wife among them, and therefore so allied with Irishwomen that they betrayed secrets, and could not be trusted on dangerous service; so insolent as to be intolerable; so rooted in idleness as there was no hope by correction to amend them.' In Munster a man might ride twenty or thirty miles and find no houses standing in a country which he had known as well inhabited as many counties in England.

'In Ulster,' Sidney wrote, 'there tyrannizeth the prince of pride; Lucifer was never more puffed up with pride and ambition than that O'Neill is; he is at present the only strong and rich man in Ireland, and he is the dangerest man and most like to bring the whole estate of this land to subversion and subjugation either to him or to some foreign prince, that ever was in Ireland.' He invited this Lucifer to come into the Pale to see him, and Shane at first agreed to meet him at Dundalk, but on second thoughts he politely declined, on the ground that the Earl of Sussex had twice attempted to assassinate him, and but for the Earl of Kildare would have put a lock upon his hands when he was passing through Dublin to England.

Hence his 'timorous and mistrustful people' would not trust him any more in English hands.

In fact O'Neill despised any honours the Queen could confer upon him.