Essex had arrived in Ireland with over…
September 1599 CE
Essex had arrived in Ireland with over seventeen thousand English troops.
He had taken the advice of the Irish privy council, to settle the south of the country with garrisons before making an attempt on Ulster, but this had dissipated his forces and he had ended up suffering numerous setbacks on a desultory progress through south Leinster and Munster.
Those expeditions he has organized have been disastrous, especially an expedition crossing the Curlew mountains to Sligo, which had been mauled by Ó Donnell at the Battle of Curlew Pass.
Thousands of his troops, shut up in unsanitary garrisons, have died of diseases such as typhoid and dysentery.