The garrison and its commander, Captain Anthony Willoughby, had been harassing the locals and bombarding the town on a regular basis for several weeks, and negotiations had been held between Willoughby and Walter Lynch (Mayor), with the Earl of Clanricarde acting as mediator.
William Burke's elder brother, and one of the two chief leaders of the Mac an Iarla wars, became Earl of Clanricarde in 1582.
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His mother was Lady Honora Burke (1675–1698), second daughter of William Burke, (d. 1687), the seventh Earl of Clanricarde (Honora was a common female name in the Burke and Walshingam families).
He was succeeded by his son and heir, Ulick, as 5th Earl of Clanricarde, who in 1622 had married Lady Anne Compton, only daughter of William Compton, 1st Earl of Northampton.
The succession crisis of the second Earl of Clanricarde and the subsequent Mac an Iarla wars, devastate his lordship, to the point where he admitted to Sir Henry Sidney that though his was the oldest Anglo-Irish lordship in Connacht, he and his people were reduced to penury "as poor a baron as liveth".