The Broken Sword of Ulster Author:Richard Cuninghame Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III The brief career of Hugh Roe O'Donnel resembles the creation of a novelist in its stirring and romantic incidents. It is a romance in veritable hi... more »story. It wins for him our sympathy by the suffering he endured in his early youth; nor does it fail to claim it at the end, when he died on a foreign shore, far from the land he loved so well. The O'Donnels, princes of Tyrconnel, known now as the County of Donegal, had descended directly from the Irish monarch, Niall the Great, otherwise known as Niall of the Nine Hostages. From his youngest son, Conall, sprang the O'Donnels; from his eldest son, Eoghan, sprang the O'Neills. Niall the Great was monarch of Ireland early in the fifth century, but the royal lineage which entitled him to be elected to the dignity of Ard-Righ, or supreme sovereign over the provincial Kings of Ireland, was old when the Christian era dawned. At an early period the O'Neills had become the more powerful of these two great houses. While the sway of the O'Donnels was mainly confined to their own territory of Tyrconnel, the sway of theO'Neills had gradually extended, and at length they stood in the proud position of having achieved almost complete supremacy in Ulster. Before the English invasion the territory of the O'Donnels was limited to the middle and western parts of Tyrconnel; but after that event, and by the aid, it is said, of England—for the O'Donnels were often on the side of the Crown—their dominions had so increased that they occasionally measured swords with their formidable relatives, the O'Neills. At the close of the sixteenth century a youthful scion of this great family, Hugh Roe O'Donnel, was an object of remarkable interest in Ulster and far beyond its limits. He was only in his fifteenth year, but, as we are informed i...« less