An example of an inaccuracy that has been reproduced by successive historians is furnished by the date of birth of Hugh O'Neill, second earl of Tyrone. Cox, Leland, Plowden and Bagwell omit to mention a date. Mitchel implies that O'Neill was born in 1542 or 1543, Meehan in 1539 or 1540, probably on the authority of Peter Lombard, papal archbishop of Armagh in the first quarter of the sixteenm century. Dunlop gives the date as ‘ about 1540 ’ Yet references in the state papers prove conclusively that his birth could not have taken place until about ten years later. In a letter from Cecil to Challoner, written after the death in 1562 of Brian O'Neill, Hugh's elder brother, it is stated that ‘ there is still another brother alive, not yet twelve years old and so a candidate to the Earldom of Tyrone still exists ’. In a letter to Queen Elizabeth, written in 1587, Hugh O'Neill refers to himself as having been ‘ a child of tender years ’ in 1562, when his brother was murdered. In the same year Sir Henry Sidney wrote to Walsingham in the following terms: ‘ I had with me the young Baron of Dungannon, Shane's eldest brother's son, whom I had bred in my home from a little boy, then very poor of goods and full feebly friended ’. As Hugh O'Neill crossed to England in 1562, and lived in Sidney's house after that date, the year 1540 is obviously inaccurate. Cecil's evidence shows him to have been about twelve in 1562, which would make the year of his birth 1550, and, as this is supported by the other evidence referred to, we must place his birth a decade later than the year usually given.