and County Offaly, which remained peaceful, and helped arrange alliances with Inchiquin in 1647 and Ormonde in 1648. The resulting larger alliance failed to stop the Cromwellian invasion of Ireland (1649–53) in which an estimated third of the Irish population died. The Irish historian Charles Gavan Duffy wrote: {{quote| Then a private gentleman, with no resources beyond his intellect and his courage, this Rory, when Ireland was weakened by defeat and confiscation, and guarded with a jealous care constantly increasing in strictness and severity, conceived the vast design of rescuing the country from England, and even accomplished it; for, in three years, England did not retain a city in Ireland but Dublin and Drogheda, and for eight years the land was possessed and the supreme authority exercised by the Confederation created by O'Moore. History contains no stricter instance of the influence of an individual mind.<ref>Charles Gavan Duffy (editor). 1845. The Ballad Poetry of Ireland</ref> }} Final years Bishop Michael Comerford wrote that after O'More's defeat at the Battle of Kilrush in April 1642 he retired and died in Kilkenny city in the winter of 1642–43, having co-founded the Irish Catholic Confederation there a few months earlier. However this ignores his contacts with Inchiquin and Ormonde in 1647–48. Others say that he fled to the island of Inishbofin, County Galway after Galway city fell in 1652. St Colman's Church on the island once bore a tablet with the inscription: Comerford quoted earlier historians who wrote that a similar watchword in Kildare was: "Our trust is in God and Our Lady, and Rory O'More". Family O'More married Jane, daughter of Sir Patrick Barnewall, of Donabate, County Dublin and his second wife Mary Bagenal, and they had two sons and four daughters. The Balyna estate was inherited from Calvagh O'More by Rory's brother Lewis. Balyna was passed down to Lewis' last surviving O'More descendant, Letitia, who was also descended from Rory O'More because her grandfather married a second cousin. Letitia married a Richard Farrell in 1751: this Farrell family henceforth took the surname More O'Ferrall. His daughter Anne, married Patrick Sarsfield from an Old English Catholic family from The Pale. His grandsons included Patrick Sarsfield, 1st Earl of Lucan, who led a Jacobite force in the Williamite War in Ireland, and his brother William Sarsfield, whose descendants include all the Earls of Lucan and the 4th and all subsequent Earls Spencer, through which