According to one telling story, Raleigh had been called before the Privy Council to explain why he had fallen out with his commanding officer in Ireland, Lord Grey of Wilton. Raleigh was already an experienced soldier, having spent his teenage years fighting for the Protestant cause in France. Wilton, however, was a notorious one. His infamy rested on his having ordered the cold-blooded killing of 600 mainly Italian and Spanish prisoners at Smerwick Fort, just north of Dingle Bay.
Even in an era of endemic violence this massacre had shocked: “Truly I never heard of such a bloody barbarous action, as the Lord Grey… committed in Ireland upon the Spaniard,” the Jacobean bishop Godfrey Goodman later recalled, “for whereas they had submitted himself to their mercy, he put some four or five hundred of them [in effect the whole number] into a yard, weaponless; and then were soldiers sent in with clubs, bills and swords, and slew everyman of them.”
Source:
Lisle, Leanda De. "A Babe Crowned in His Cradle" After Elizabeth: The Rise of James of Scotland and the Struggle for the Throne of England. New York: Ballantine, 2005. 68. Print.
Original Source Listed:
Goodman, Court of James, vol. I, pp. 66-7.
Further Reading:
Arthur Grey, 14th Baron Grey de Wilton
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