by Des Ekin
For the first few hours, Leveson rolled all over the Spaniards. Zubiaur’s flagship was driven onto the rocks with its rudder smashed and nearly three metres of water in its hold. The Spaniards’ second biggest ship was driven ashore where it ‘lies bulged and half sunk – never able to rise again’, according to Preston. Two other Spanish vessels, including the vice-admiral’s ship, also went aground. The Maria Francesca was sunk with its precious cargo of wheat, and the Cisne Camello was reduced to matchwood.
Eager to capitalise on his success, Leveson launched several landing craft and headed for shore to complete his takeover. But the tide of the battle was about to turn. Donal Cam O’Sullivan Beare had been waiting 24 kilometres away and had received Zubiaur’s call just in time. He force-marched five hundred veterans to Castlehaven. Together with the Baltimore O’Driscolls, they arrived just as the English were closing in for the kill. Leveson saw the Irish relief force and had second thoughts. He stayed on board his ships.
Donal Cam’s nephew, Philip O’Sullivan, described what happened next. ‘Zubiaur, elated and emboldened, took his cannon from the vessels and for two days right vigorously bombarded the English fleet,’ he wrote. ‘Finally, the balls, rendered red-hot by the rapid firing, pierced the English ships which they struck from stem to stern, hurling men and planks into the sea.’
Leveson’s flagship, the Warspite, was riddled with cannonball holes. ‘Zubiaur’s first shot into this ship killed sixty men who were seated at table,’ claimed O’Sullivan. As the bombardment continued, ‘soldiers and sailors fell right and left’.
Leveson tried to retreat, but a pitiless wind kept blowing the Warspite back into range of the Spanish gunners. ‘[I was] forced to ride four and twenty hours within the play of those five pieces of ordnance,’ Leveson later recalled, ‘and received in that time about three hundred shot, through hulk, mast and tackle.’
He fought free only by cutting his cables, abandoning all his anchors and towing out his ships – a hideously dangerous task under fire – in order to find a usable wind. ‘He pulled out of Castlehaven on the 9th,’ wrote Preston, ‘but did not put out till he saw all his ships out before him.’ Leveson later explained that he left Castlehaven only because he had done ‘as much as might be done by sea’.
Miraculously, the Warspite did not sink but survived the journey back to Kinsale, where everyone was amazed by the hundreds of holes in its hull. With a precision worthy of John Lennon, the surgeon William Farmer had to count them all – a total of 209, he finally calculated.
English reports claimed that all Zubiaur’s Spanish ships were sunk ‘save one’ and that Zubiaur was forced to flee the port. The English lost just eight men. Spanish reports tell a dramatically different story. Zubiaur’s ship was badly damaged, but was already so high and dry that it could be repaired. Two of the Scottish merchantmen were also salvageable. Two ships were write-offs but the final ship, a French vessel, was almost unharmed. It was fitted with cannon and sent to Baltimore. The Spanish claimed that they lost forty men in the encounter.
Viewed realistically, the battle must have claimed many English lives: probably well into three figures, if not the 575 that some Spanish claimed. They didn’t win back Castlehaven and they didn’t wipe out the Spanish fleet. What they did do was place Zubiaur into much the same position as Águila in Kinsale: with his transport crippled, the Admiral could no longer simply sail home if things went wrong. His Spaniards were fighting with their backs to the sea, facing either victory or death.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
‘SEND US HOME SOME GREYHOUNDS’
MEANWHILE, back in Spain, there was almost total ignorance of the desperate situation in Kinsale. A letter written around this time to Águila’s secretary, Jeronimo de la Torre, reveals the staggering lack of awareness. Jeronimo’s brother Nicholas believed that the Spanish had created a prosperous new colony in Ireland and that anyone with insider knowledge could make a fast buck out of the business opportunities.
—Which goods should I bring to turn a profit? Nicholas asked. Oh, and by the way, he added: can you send me back some greyhounds and horses?
Nicholas obviously had no inkling of his brother’s plight. If Jeronimo had possessed a greyhound during those dark and hungry days, it would probably have gone into the cooking pot.
But then, nobody else had any idea, either. There had been silence from Kinsale since 21 October, when the authorities had received Águila’s letters asking for more men and provisions. An order issued from Spain in early December also reveals how out of touch they were. ‘Don Juan del Águila has been instructed to raise in Ireland two companies of [cavalry],’ it said.
King Felipe also demanded that a swift ship should ‘go and come with news’ from Kinsale. That was on 25 November. The news the King obviously hadn’t received was that Águila was in a totally blockaded harbour.
Now, in December, Águila anxiously scanned the grey-green horizon every day for the reinforcements he’d requested. But they never came. Instead, a letter from the all-powerful Duke of Lerma was winging across the ocean. Perhaps it was just as well that Águila did not receive it until much later. Its message was enough to drive the stoutest heart to despair.
Answering Águila’s plea for thousands of soldiers, Lerma waffled like a true politician. ‘There is a good quantity of everything, and more is being provided,’ he wrote. ‘His Majesty is keeping this matter before his eyes.’
But what was actually being done?
‘There are now on the march 150 lances, and they will embark shortly,’ Lerma pledged. Then in a triumphant postscript: ‘Since writing this … there is to be added another company of horse with the 150 lances, so there are to be sent 200.’
Two hundred soldiers. To fight Blount’s seven thousand.
Another letter from War Secretary Esteban de Ibarra raised the figure to 220 soldiers, ‘well armed and well horsed’. The relief ships would also carry corn, oil and honeycombs.
But if compliments were cannonballs, Águila would have had no shortage. ‘His Majesty has confidence in your care and worth,’ Lerma assured him. Ibarra was more personal with his praise. ‘When I remember who Don Juan del Águila is, my heart is lightened,’ he wrote, ‘and I begin to hope for great things, as I hope God will grant them to your valour.’
The reality was that Ireland was far from the top of the Spaniards’ agenda. They had other problems on their minds – the war in Flanders, the threat from the Ottomans in the Mediterranean, and the possibility of English reprisal raids. The commander of military forces in Castile, Don Martin de Padilla, seemed to have the best grasp of the Irish situation. ‘We shall not be able to finish our task with so small a force,’ he told Felipe on 30 November. ‘The reinforcement needed is one that will end the business once and for all.’
He added pointedly: ‘From motives of economy, expeditions are undertaken with such small forces that they principally serve to irritate our enemies, rather than to punish them.’ While they might still hope for ‘a good result’ if O’Neill linked up with Águila, the only solution was to send a huge armed force. Yet the pragmatic Padilla accepted that this would not happen. ‘I consider it difficult, if not impossible, for us in so short a time, at whatever cost, to fit out the [necessary] fleet and forces,’ he wrote.
Zubiaur was equally exasperated. In one letter home, he colourfully compared the Spanish authorities to swarms of flies, always frantically in motion but getting nowhere. ‘They take a full year to assemble 4,000 men, and then half of them are youngsters. Thousands who are sent here will die. It is shameful.’
The Spanish Council of State suggested to the King that troop levels in Ireland should be brought up to six thousand. And by 7 December – unaware that Zubiaur’s fleet had been severely crippled in Castlehaven the previous day – the Spanish officials unveiled a plan for what could be called the Fourth Wave of the Armada to Ireland.
‘Five ships are ready in Lisbon, only awaiting a fair wind to sail,’ the
y assured Felipe.
However, the troop levels were mostly aspirational. Only 190 infantry were actually waiting at port, together with ‘some’ soldiers levied from the nearby forts. Another three cavalry companies might be requisitioned from the local guards. They would join the two imaginary cavalry companies that Águila was supposed to conjure up in Ireland. As for infantry, ‘orders have been sent’ for the raising of another 2,000 Portuguese – but they admitted there had been difficulties in turning these orders into reality. ‘Men are being levied in all Castile and Portugal,’ Ibarra declared confidently. There were other grandiose plans to divert 14,000 infantry and 1,200 cavalry from Flanders.
The King’s advisors did their best to create the impression of genuine action. But to modern readers, it is all too reminiscent of the ghost regiments of non-existent troops that Adolf Hitler moved around his eastern front in 1945.
By mid-December, the Council of State was ready to announce a decision. ‘As the Irish affair has been undertaken, every possible effort should be made to continue,’ it ruled. ‘… but we cannot hope to fit out a great fleet.’ The council recommended: ‘The force in Lisbon should therefore sail immediately the weather permits.’ (This was the 220 lancers.)
Once that Third Wave had departed, preparations for the Fourth Wave should begin. Local officials were supposed to raise the proposed guards’ cavalry and the notional two thousand Portuguese infantry ‘with all speed’ for despatch in the New Year. ‘The most important thing in this business is that the Earls [O’Neill and O’Donnell] should join Don Juan del Águila,’ Lerma wrote to Oviedo. ‘His Majesty charges you to make your utmost efforts to this end.’
The Council of State ruled: ‘If they have not already effected a junction [between Irish and Spanish] they should be urged to do so.’
And if that was not possible? ‘Try to hold out,’ ordered the Council of State.
So as the Spanish prepared to celebrate Christmas, the only message of good cheer that the folks back home had for Águila’s beleaguered Spaniards was essentially: Hang in there.
No, wait. The Spanish authorities did have a Plan B. ‘Since Your Majesty’s treasury … cannot meet all the demands upon it,’ the council wrote to Felipe, ‘… it will be necessary that God with his Almighty hand should come to our aid.’
But how, specifically?
‘The first and most important of all preparations will be to appease His anger, provoked by the vices and sins so prevalent in this country,’ the council explained. ‘We must therefore earnestly seek a remedy by mending our ways of life, and by constant prayer.’
As the Spanish wrote their plea for a joining together of Irish and Spanish, Hugh O’Neill was still somewhere in the heartland of Ireland, making his slow and tortuous journey south.
He claimed to have first heard of the invasion in early October, which sounds about right, since the news reached the English in northern Carrickfergus at the same time. Yet nearly fifty days elapsed between the landing and the date his trek south began in earnest – he left his hometown of Dungannon on 9 November.
He had spent most of those fifty days burning, looting and pillaging the areas around Louth and Meath which were part of ‘the English Pale’, a small region in the east of Ireland that was usually solidly under English control. A report on 7 October said he was ‘burning and spoiling in Louth’ and ‘took a great prey [of cattle]’.
Bizarrely, these raids became a spectator sport for O’Neill’s family and entourage. On one major raid in Meath, he ‘spoiled 22 villages, burning both horses and corn … [and stole] 2,000 cows, 1,000 garrauds [workhorses] 4,000 sheep and swine’. He razed another seven villages, forcing the impoverished Irish inhabitants out of their blazing homes and onto the roads as beggars. All of this was watched with interest, even enjoyment, by O’Neill’s wife and sixteen society women, whom he had brought along purely for the ride.
The English wondered if this would be the extent of O’Neill’s war. They theorised that he was afraid that the winter march and the inevitable battle would make it ‘dangerous for him to advance so far from home’.
Modern writers are deeply divided on O’Neill’s mindset. Some believe he was vacillating, over-cautious, even cowardly. Others state that he was prudently building up his forces; that he was trying to open up an eastern front; that he was laying false trails; or that he was implementing some brilliant strategy that transcended the obvious. Of all the controversies that surround Kinsale, this is the most likely to send sparks flying. The truth is that nobody knows what was going on in O’Neill’s head.
Ludhaigh O’Cleary says he ‘waited till everything was ready’ before leaving, and ‘spent some time’ preying on the Pale. Philip O’Sullivan keeps it simple: ‘O’Neill, finding an opportunity, invaded Meath, where he ravaged the English and Anglo-Irish far and wide, and returned home laden with booty.’
O’Sullivan’s take is uncomplicated and honest. There is no reference to any far-seeing strategy, just the basic pleasure of pillaging and returning with loads of spoil. O’Sullivan doesn’t even have to explain to his 1600s readership why that made sense.
In Gaelic society, cattle raids and burnings were a traditional way of asserting dominance over neighbours. Chieftainship was based on bloodline, yet no one could inherit power: you had to be elected by your kin. Once in power, you could be deposed or killed in a heartbeat, often by a close relative, so it was important that you kept up a tough reputation. And the best way to do that was to terrorise adjacent territories.
As historian Cyril Falls wrote in 1950: ‘The first adventure of a young [Gaelic] lord … was to raid his neighbour’s cattle in order to bring on a fight.’ In one Ulster castle, a poet wrote approvingly how the menfolk went to sleep knowing they would be up at daybreak to burn the next town, to rustle its cattle, and ‘to leave many a wife husbandless’.
Today a social scientist might describe this as typical of ‘a culture of honour’, a technical term referring to a general readiness to use violence to defend one’s status and assert one’s will on others. It was particularly prevalent in the cattle-based societies of north Ireland and the Scottish borders. Herding communities are different to crop-growing communities because a person’s property – the herd – can be stolen within minutes. Where there is no effective central power to inhibit or to punish theft, an individual must develop a reputation for strength and toughness. He can’t leave it until after the theft – he must get his retaliation in first.
Cyril Falls’s insight meshes perfectly with the observation by modern social scientist J. K. Campbell that, in similar societies in rural Greece, ‘the critical moment in the development of a young shepherd’s reputation is his first quarrel’. The dispute must demonstrate in public that he will react violently to any insult.
In this interpretation, O’Neill was taking advantage of the absence of English troops to enhance his reputation as a man of power, to settle a few old scores, and to enrich his cattle stocks. This was how the Gaels had always done things. O’Neill was going back to his roots.
Águila simply did not understand this mindset. In his view, it was parochial and failed to see the bigger picture. ‘I am sent to conquer the country,’ he admonished O’Neill in exasperation, ‘not to burn the people’s corn.’ According to a spy in Kinsale, that frustration was widely felt among the invading troops. ‘The Spanish mislike [O’Neill’s] burnings,’ he reported, ‘and say they came to win or lose the country.’ In this author’s opinion O’Neill’s tragedy was that he could never escape his ‘culture of honour’ roots to share that grand vision.
Eventually his army of around three thousand men trudged down through the midlands to Tipperary and into County Cork, where they joined forces with O’Donnell at Bandon a few days after Zubiaur’s arrival at Castlehaven.
The combined might of the insurgent army was now a mere fifteen kilometres from Kinsale.
O’Neill’s sluggishness had been steadily lowering morale among Águ
ila’s troops.
According to the surgeon William Farmer: ‘The Spaniards in the town, being daily beaten with shot from the camp … began to repine at [O’Neill] and his adherents for breaking their promises with them.’
It was all reflecting badly on the clerics Oviedo and Archer, who had staked their reputations on rapid support from the insurgents. ‘The Spaniard curseth the priests, the priests curseth the Irish, [and] the Irish curseth them both,’ wrote the Dublin clergyman John Rider.
Fr Archer demanded the right to travel to the Irish camp and argue his case. He claimed to be the only one they would deal with. Águila refused – the last thing he wanted was to let his greatest critic spread his disaffection around the countryside, Smerwick style.
For the same reasons, Águila also did his best to keep Oviedo out of the loop. But then, Oviedo was doing much the same with Águila. The insurgent chieftains were writing confidential letters directly addressed to Oviedo. Águila intercepted them and tore them up.
Bearing all this in mind, Águila’s next letter to O’Neill in mid-December was a masterpiece of self-control. ‘I was confident that Your Excellencies would have come [after the Spanish arrived at Castlehaven],’ he wrote. ‘I beseech you to do so with as much celerity and as well furnished as you possibly may.’ He assured O’Neill that the English forces were so weary and depleted that they could not guard more than a third of their trenches. ‘Their first fury resisted, all is ended,’ he predicted.
When O’Neill still failed to appear, he took a tougher line.
—You have promised to attack the enemy in all parts, he wrote bluntly. If you will not do so, I will make my own composition and return home.
To complicate things further, Oviedo began his own negotiations. Without telling Águila, he held meetings with the disaffected Spanish captains and selected one officer to slip out of the town and trek to the Irish camp at Bandon. His message was simple.
