Sir George Carew, however, removed the child, and commenced the battery. A breach was made into the cellar under the great hall, one gunner only being killed.
Captain Flower then led the attack and entered the hall through the breach, forcing the ward to retire. The flag of the besiegers was hoisted from the turrets of the hall, and night coming on Captain Slingsby was ordered to hold the position until the morning.
A dropping fire was kept up all night. The Constable, seeing that to successfully hold the castle was impossible, tried to escape with some of the warders, but he and others were killed in the attempt, one only getting away. His head was placed upon a stake in the camp as the President had said.
The rest of the garrison retired to the keep. In the morning the attackers burned the heavy wooden door which guarded the stairway, but they had to wait two hours for the smoke to clear away. As soon as it had done so, one of the garrison appeared to ask for the lives of his comrades if they surrendered, but it appears he gave himself up before an answer was returned.
The officers and men then ascended the stairs in single file as the width of the passage necessitated, but met with no opposition, the garrison having retired to the battlements, which were protected only by one door.
Here a terrible hand to hand encounter took place. Some of the warders were killed, while the rest jumped from the parapet into the water below, and were either drowned or killed by the guards stationed beneath the tower.
The English lost ten soldiers and one ensign, while about twenty-one men were wounded. Of the defenders of the castle about eighty men were killed, while the Four Masters state that some women and children also lost their lives. They remark that the place would not have been so easily won had not the “Earl of Desmond’s people dispersed from him.”
The rebels had burned the town of Glin upon the approach of the Royal troops.
During the rising the castle had been used as a storehouse for the “Sugan Earl’s” forces, and a Limerick merchant called Anthony Arthurs seems to have dispensed his goods from it.
Sir George Carew placed a guard of twenty-one soldiers in it under the command of Captain Nicholas Mordant.