Fínghin Mac Carthaigh Reagh/Florence MacCarthy, the Lord of Carbery whose duality stung Carew into styling him ‘the Machiaevellian ambodexter’ (Stafford, Pacata Hibernia i, p. 118), spent the last thirty years of his life detained in London. He passed his long years of confinement seeking the redress of English law and shoring fragments against the ruin of the culture which he had tried, unsuccessfully, to reconcile with the new order. He sought to interest the new men, focused only on an anglicised future, in the Gaelic past. MacCarthy wrote to the poet, Fear Feasa Ó an Cháinte, in about 1602. Curiously, the letter, found among Cecil's papers, is written first in Irish and then, with the transition ‘Which in English is …’, in translation, like a specimen parallel-text. He tells Ó an Cháinte – who spoke no English – that, to solace ‘thouermuch melancholie’ of his confinement, he has resolved

and he summons the file to assist him.