by Des Ekin
—We are in desperate straits, Oviedo told the Irish chieftain. If you cannot join us within six days, everything is lost.
English spies were intercepting nearly all the written communications. Blount could have destroyed the letters, but instead he read them and put them back into the system. It would play into Blount’s hands if O’Neill attacked Kinsale. That would mean an open battle – a clash Blount believed he could win.
Both commanders had narrow escapes at around this time. Blount was standing in the open with Carew, inspecting a new earthwork, when a sharp-eyed Spanish musketeer spotted them and took aim. The ball passed right between them, shattering the backbone of an English soldier. Elsewhere, Águila was ‘slightly wounded in the face by the splinter of stone broken by a great shot’.
In Castlehaven, Zubiaur was still licking his wounds after the sea battle. Any sense of celebration at their ‘victory’ over the English navy soon disappeared amid the screams and moans of the casualties.
‘These poor people who’ve had arms and legs amputated are suffering and dying because they have no beds, and no sheets to cover them,’ Zubiaur complained to the King. ‘I have given all my shirts and sheets for coverings and bandages – if I had more, I would give more.’ He pleaded for more resources, ‘for the love of God’. Even the able-bodied were suffering from the brutal Irish weather. Zubiaur’s plea for five hundred long cloaks to protect his sentries from the driving rain demonstrated just how ill-equipped they were. His men were literally shivering in the cold, he said. ‘It is pitiful to see these poor soldiers, naked and exposed to the rain and the bad conditions.’
He had already written to Águila regretting that he had not the ships or firepower to join him in Kinsale. Still, he had good news about the naval battle at Castlehaven.
—The English cannot brag of victory, he wrote to Águila. Their flagship was shot through.
Alonso Ocampo, the veteran leader of Zubiaur’s ground troops, reported to Águila that, while one Spanish ship was undoubtedly lost, the others could be refloated. Even their ammunition had been safely beached on the sand. Ocampo was not impressed with the ‘castle’ that gave the port its name.
—Five thousand men could not defend this place, he wrote. And all we have is five hundred naked conscripts and 150 sick.
Zubiaur had brought with him an expert quartermaster-general, Pedro Lopez de Soto, who confirmed that Castlehaven was ‘not defensible’. He recommended that they concentrate their forces on Baltimore and Bearhaven.
Admiral Zubiaur agreed. In fact, he seemed to become obsessed with transforming Baltimore into an impregnable modern fortress. Its harbour was maravillosisimo, he raved – not just wonderful, but superb. Zubiaur’s dangerous preoccupation with Baltimore was diverting him from his main task: breaking the English stranglehold on Kinsale. He despatched only 120 of his five hundred troops to join O’Neill and O’Donnell. Later, he sent another eighty. Even now, it seems inexplicable that he should send a mere two hundred of his men to the front. Águila had ordered him to send as many as he could spare. Alfonso Ocampo, who was placed in command of the two hundred, wrote to Águila explaining that others were needed to guard the guns and ammunition: ‘The cause I sent no more [troops] to O’Donnell was to guard the munition.’
Zubiaur also armed around seven hundred Irish troops from West Cork and sent them to O’Neill along with his two hundred Spaniards, issuing them with six standards or flags to give the impression of a larger Spanish army. The locals were trained and disciplined in tercio style and fitted out with corselets (upper body armour) and knee-length metal waistbands known as taces. In one of his oddest decisions, the admiral sent a hundred Spanish fighters to guard remote Bearhaven, far away from the war zone, while its chieftain, Donal Cam O’Sullivan Beare, took his less experienced Irish troops to fight alongside O’Neill. No one seems to have thought that it would make much more sense to do things the other way around.
By 13 December, O’Neill was still ten kilometres away from Kinsale, but closing in fast. He encamped at Coolcarron Hill, just north of the English camp, closing off his enemy’s landward supply route. It was Blount’s turn to feel the tightening garrotte of besiegement.
For the next week he remained invisible to the English. They could sense the presence of the ‘arch-traitor’ and feel his icy grip, but they could never catch sight of him. Then, on 21 December, he suddenly appeared about 1.5km from Spital. ‘Towards night,’ Carew wrote, ‘[O’Neill] showed himself with the most part of his horse and foot upon a hill.’
Even in the half-light, it would have made a daunting sight. By this stage O’Neill commanded an army of around six thousand, so even a section of infantry and cavalry would have been an impressive force. The variety of soldiers was remarkable. There were traditional Irish light horsemen, armed with javelins, their fighting techniques virtually unchanged since the days of Cúchulainn. There were the ferocious Scottish ‘redshanks’ – the gallow-glass warriors with their giant battleaxes. At the other extreme, there were O’Neill’s and Tyrrell’s modern troops with their smart red uniforms and modern firearms, and Ocampo’s Spaniards with their fluttering banners and shining steel helmets.
When he saw the force he was about to face, Blount reputedly burst out: ‘The Kingdom is lost today.’
Riding at the head of this mighty, multi-coloured army was his archenemy – Hugh O’Neill, the Earl of Tyrone, who now preferred to be known by his Gaelic title of The Great O’Neill.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
THE GREAT PERSUADER
IT is strange to think that the man who held the title of The O’Neill – the chieftain who represented the essence of this ancient family – may not even have been an O’Neill.
Hugh’s supposed grandfather, Con, had kept a mistress, who in the free spirit of the age also had a relationship with a blacksmith named O’Kelly. Her child, Matthew, was widely acknowledged to be the blacksmith’s son. But much later, she presented him to Con as his own son, and he accepted him as such. Legally, under the Gaelic system, a love-child had equal rights to any other child, so Hugh O’Neill, as Matthew’s second son, was fully entitled to join the family queue to become chieftain. But genetically, Hugh may not have had a single drop of O’Neill blood in him.
The Great O’Neill was not a tall man – in fact, Fynes Moryson, who met him, says he was ‘of mean stature’. But he was robust and ‘able to endure labours, watching and hard fare’. The familiar portrait of O’Neill as a powerfully stocky figure with cropped hair, bushy black beard and full armour is almost certainly a Victorian fantasy. Drawings from the 1620s are probably nearer to the reality: they show a small, thin, wiry man with mid-length hair, pointed beard and dark, intelligent eyes.
Young Hugh had one huge advantage over his relatives: he had the support of the English colonisers. Even as a child, he had been earmarked as their puppet leader. They had no idea that they were dealing with an expert puppetmaster who would soon be pulling their strings instead.
Hugh was raised in the English manner by a foster family near Dublin, and was soon moving between the two worlds of Saxon and Gael with consummate ease. By his thirties Hugh was enthusiastically fighting Irish rebels in Munster and Ulster. ‘A creature of our own’ was how Queen Elizabeth described him.
Meanwhile, the complex mess that was the O’Neill succession race had been simplified when both Hugh’s father, Matthew, and Hugh’s elder brother, Brian, had been liquidated by rival relatives. The clan leadership went to Hugh’s elderly cousin.
Then, in 1587 the English made Hugh the Earl of Tyrone and granted him huge parcels of land. However, they covered their risks by playing him off against the elderly cousin. The territory was divided, with Hugh controlling only the southern part. He seethed with a silent resentment. And behind the scenes, he was hedging his bets too. He was building up family ties with other clans, including the powerful O’Donnells of Donegal. Hugh O’Neill was declared next in line for the chieftaincy, but one man had
other ideas – a relative named Hugh Gaveloch O’Neill. Hugh had Gaveloch executed; some say he strangled him himself.
For seven years, Hugh O’Neill remained superficially loyal to England. He helped to quell a local rebellion, but felt cheated when the English commander Henry Bagenal deprived him of the credit. Yet all the time his loyalties were shifting. The Great Armada shipwreck symbolised the widening split in his personality – he slaughtered many of the Spanish survivors, yet sheltered another group that included several prominent noblemen.
O’Neill feared for his future when he saw how the English illegally jailed young Red Hugh O’Donnell and framed an Irish leader in nearby Monaghan in a shameless land grab. A claimant to some territories of the McMahon clan had petitioned the English for approval only to be arrested on a trumped-up charge, convicted by a rigged jury dominated by soldiers, and executed within two days. His lands were seized and divided out among Henry Bagenal and his colonist cronies. O’Neill sympathised with young turks like Red Hugh, who wanted the English out and the Spanish in. Soon he was giving them covert support. His rift with the English became highly personal when he eloped with Mabel Bagenal, the twenty-year-old sister of General Henry Bagenal. Immature and gullible, Mabel was captivated by O’Neill’s charm but quickly came down to earth when she realised she was just one of many women in his life. Henry never forgave Hugh and worked constantly to destroy him.
The English began to suspect O’Neill’s loyalty and summoned him to answer complaints. But his remarkable powers of persuasion convinced them he was still their man. O’Neill was clearly a man of immense charm: Fynes Moryson describes him as ‘affable’ with a ‘dissembling, subtle and profound wit’. It seemed he could fake sincerity like nobody else. His eyes overflowed with tears of passion as he told opposing sides, in turn, how his heart was truly committed to their cause.
One English judge interrogated the suspect. ‘[O’Neill], much lamenting with tears, said, I pray you let me not lose you, that hath been my dear friend,’ he recalled. Overwhelmed, the judge held his hand – unaware that O’Neill was currently plotting to replace all English judges with Spanish inquisitors.
O’Neill vowed emotionally to an English friend that if he ever discovered that O’Donnell was involved with Spain he would be ‘a mortal enemy to him’. As one modern author comments, he had ‘an apparently infinite capacity for duplicity’.
Some claim that he was always fully committed to the Irish cause. His double-dealing was a necessary exercise in an asymmetrical conflict. He was buying time. But that doesn’t explain why he sometimes acted, needlessly, against his own revolutionary interests during his pro-English phases. It is more likely, in my opinion, that he was genuinely torn. He was like a married man in the grip of an affair, pledging his future to his new love and then to his old, and, each time, genuinely meaning it. But who knows? O’Neill was, to quote Winston Churchill when referring to the Soviet Union, a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
All this time O’Neill was quietly raising a powerful private army. He was allowed a militia of six hundred men, but nobody said they had to be the same men. By training successive batches, he soon assembled a force of 2,500 in County Tyrone alone, with another 5,500 throughout Ulster. He reputedly rode from village to village, showing locals how to use a musket. If any man showed particular skill, he was given the gun to train others. He modernised his farms to make more money to buy guns. He imported lead, supposedly to roof his forts. It was melted down to make bullets.
The first big test of arms came when O’Neill attacked and defeated Bagenal at Clontibret, County Monaghan. Bagenal was amazed to see that the insurgent army wore neat red uniforms and shot their muskets with professional skill.
O’Neill was declared a traitor in 1595. The following year he offered a grovelling submission, ‘craving the Queen’s mercy on the knees of [my] heart’.
But this was just the beginning. In 1598 O’Neill crushed an English force at the Yellow Ford in Armagh. Between 800 and 1,000 English died in this, O’Neill’s greatest victory. Among the fatalities was Henry Bagenal.
The following year, the Earl of Essex arrived with a 17,300-strong army and smugly swore he’d crush O’Neill. Instead, O’Neill made a fool out of him. After Essex had lost 75 percent of his army in pointless marches, O’Neill met him for a secret parlay where he talked him into a truce. One insider claimed that O’Neill promised to help Essex become king of England and to control Ireland if O’Neill were given the title of Irish Governor – but no one knows for sure.
If the story were true, it would come as no surprise. Over the years, Hugh O’Neill had offered to give Ireland over to an Austrian (the Archduke Albert VII), two Spaniards (Felipes II and III) and a Scot (James VI), so it would not have been a huge leap to offer it to an Englishman as well. One of the greatest misapprehensions about O’Neill was that he wanted only a free and independent Ireland.
O’Neill had another motive for seeking a truce with Essex: he was now playing in a much bigger ballpark. He was in regular contact with Spain and expected aid soon. It suited him to stall for a while.
Meanwhile, in a bid to force Felipe’s hand, he had reinvented himself as a campaigner for religious freedom. Although a traditional Catholic, O’Neill was not particularly devout. He had happily attended Protestant services. Essex once snorted at O’Neill: ‘Thou carest as much for religion as my horse.’ However, when O’Neill saw Spain’s eagerness to aid the Catholic League rebels in Brittany, he declared a crusade. He compared Protestantism to an infection which had to be eradicated. He lobbied Águila in France, Felipe in Spain, and the Pope in Rome. ‘Chiefly and principally I fight for the Catholic faith to be planted throughout our poor country,’ he announced. He had always felt that way, he maintained, but hadn’t shown his hand. ‘I refrained myself from giving others to understand my intentions.’
This was an important moment, because O’Neill had created a terrifying template: that armed insurrection and the cause of Catholic freedom were one and the same thing. The inference drawn by extremists on the other side was that every Catholic was an insurgent by definition. Although this was obviously a specious argument, it created a spiral of mistrust that still plagues us today.
Many devout Catholics were cynical about O’Neill’s change of emphasis.
—We were Catholics when you weren’t, one Dubliner snapped back at him.
O’Neill’s only hope was to persuade the Pope to force all his co-religionists into his crusade. However, the neutral-minded Catholics also had powerful voices in Rome.
It was during this propaganda war that O’Neill’s nastier side emerged. He had plenty of good points – he was an inspirational figure, a born leader and a brilliant general – and because of this, history tends to whitewash his darker deeds.
In O’Neill’s heartland, Catholic priests often had common-law wives. Missionaries like Fr James Archer stridently demanded they return to celibacy. O’Neill decided to curry favour with the Pope by taking direct action. His representative at the Vatican explained that O’Neill did not punish the priests themselves, out of respect for Rome. Instead, he punished the wives. When they repeatedly ignored his recriminations, he would mutilate them by slashing their faces wide open. Others were flogged or branded with irons. Even in a brutal age, these punishments were particularly cruel and permanent, much harsher than the penalties recorded for similar ‘offences’ elsewhere. And remember, this was not an accusation by his enemies. It was something O’Neill actually took pride in.
(Águila’s great-grandfather, a canon of the Church, kept a female partner. It is strange to think that, had O’Neill been in power, the lady would have been mutilated and disgraced instead of founding St Teresa’s convent.)
All in all, O’Neill’s record with women was not great. He treated his wives badly, and not just poor Mabel. His fourth wife, Catherine, claimed that he used to get drunk and beat her up.
By early 1600, O’Neill’s rebellion had
flared up far and wide. He took a lap of honour around Ireland, dispensing favours and punishing opponents. He was at the height of his power. A Spanish invasion at this point might actually have succeeded.
The arrival of Charles Blount, with his ruthless scorched-earth policy and his 24/7/365 campaigning, forced O’Neill to concentrate on his northern base, where he was rapidly squeezed between two enemy fronts. Águila’s arrival left him with no option but to bet everything on the journey south. As Carew put it, he had ‘to win the horse or lose the saddle’.
Now, three months after the landing, he had finally reached Kinsale. And the dice were ready to roll.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
‘THEY DIED BY DOZENS ON A HEAP’
The siege continued, with great miseries to both the armies, and not without cause, considering the season of the year, and the condition of the country, that afforded little relief to either.
– William Monson, seventeenth-century English historian
BY EARLY December, both sides were losing soldiers at a truly terrifying rate. Blount was losing forty men every single day to sickness, exposure and exhaustion. Fynes Moryson also reported that the newest arrivals were ‘dying by the dozens each night’.
Meanwhile, inside the town, the bloody flux continued to ravage the Spanish. ‘Dysentery is daily carrying off [considerable] numbers,’ one priest reported.
Let’s take a virtual-reality tour through Kinsale’s two opposing army bases to see what life is like for the pitiable soldiers – few of them volunteers – who are condemned to suffer the rigours of a siege through the worst winter in anyone’s memory. Our tour may be virtual, but the sights we will see are all based on witness records, and the words we hear will all be authentic.
Before we set out, make sure you are well wrapped up – we are in the chilly core of Europe’s Little Ice Age, and the temperature by night is well below freezing. Even in daylight, chilling fogs often enshroud the blighted landscape, locking out any cheering rays from the sun. On a bad day, the lashing rain will soak you to the skin within seconds. On a good day, the insidious misty mizzle will have the same effect within minutes. The moaning winds, often carrying flurries of jagged hail, create a wind-chill that leaves you shivering with cold.
