section_path: Wars and overseas trade/Ireland
section_name: Ireland
paragraph_text: Ireland
  
  Although Ireland was one of her two kingdoms, Elizabeth faced a hostile, and in places virtually autonomous, Irish population that adhered to Catholicism and was willing to defy her authority and plot with her enemies. Her policy there was to grant land to her courtiers and prevent the rebels from giving Spain a base from which to attack England. In the course of a series of uprisings, Crown forces pursued scorched-earth tactics, burning the land and slaughtering man, woman and child. During a revolt in Munster led by Gerald FitzGerald, in 1582, an estimated 30,000 Irish people starved to death. The poet and colonist Edmund Spenser wrote that the victims "were brought to such wretchedness as that any stony heart would have rued the same". Elizabeth advised her commanders that the Irish, "that rude and barbarous nation", be well treated, but she or her commanders showed no remorse when force and bloodshed served their authoritarian purpose.
  
  Between 1594 and 1603, Elizabeth faced her most severe test in Ireland during the Nine Years' War, a revolt that took place at the height of hostilities with Spain, who backed the rebel leader, Hugh O'Neill. In spring 1599, Elizabeth sent Robert Devereux, to put the revolt down. To her frustration, he made little progress and returned to England in defiance of her orders. He was replaced by Charles Blount, who took three years to defeat the rebels. O'Neill finally surrendered in 1603, a few days after Elizabeth's death. Soon afterwards, a peace treaty was signed between England and Spain.