The flight of the Gaelic lords from Ulster, and the delicately balanced relationship between Henri IV, James I and Philip III in the early 1600s, effectively eliminated the remote prospect of a revival of Franco-Irish intrigue and closed a chapter on Ireland's short-lived political relations with France that was not re-opened until the 1640s. For almost sixty years, between the early 1520s and the early 1580s, the Irish had become embroiled in intrigue with the French for a variety of reasons. All the protagonists – the tenth earl of Desmond, Gerald Fitzgerald, Con O'Neill, Manus O'Donnell, O'Doherty, Cormac O'Connor, MacWilliam Burke, Shane O'Neill, Conor O'Brien, James Fitzmaurice, Brian MacGeoghegan andWilliam Nugent – were driven by essentially personal, dynastic or seigneurial motives. They sought French assistance to bolster their campaigns against the crown at times when they were experiencing particular difficulties in their immediate locales, and their rhetoric alone elevated their intensely localised disputes to the status of a ‘national’ cause. Some, such as James Fitzmaurice, sought French assistance to back their efforts to defend Catholicism in Ireland as part of their agenda for protecting their position and privileges in opposition to the advance of Anglicisation and Protestantism. Typically, when Gaelic lords such as Shane O'Neill and Manus O'Donnell were seeking better treatment from the English crown and the lord deputy and Irish council, they made political capital out of rumours of their alleged or real associations with the French in order to apply pressure on the English.