The Last Armada

by Des Ekin

  But sometimes praying wasn’t quite enough.

  Hugh O’Neill was growing concerned. His force had left Coolcarron Hill at midnight, with less than 5km to go to their objective on Ardmartin Ridge. Yet as the grey steel of dawn was edging the horizon, he had still to reach his destination – and the various units had become separated. O’Donnell’s rearguard was nowhere to be seen.

  That bothered O’Neill. His greatest victory, at the Yellow Ford in Armagh, had been possible only because the English had allowed their divisions to drift apart. It would be ironic if he were to be defeated for the same reason. What on earth had gone wrong?

  According to George Carew, O’Neill had become hopelessly lost, ‘by the darkness of the night and the ignorance of his guides, having but two miles to march at the most, missing his way’. The Irish annalist said the troops ‘mistook their road and lost their way’.

  That hardly rings true. The route from Coolcarron to Ardmartin – from one hill to the next – was straightforward, and O’Neill had local guides. If Bustamante could repeatedly find his way to the camp in the dark, it would have been astonishing if those guides could get lost in their own backyard.

  This was a distance that most people could walk in an hour. Yet O’Donnell – the fleet-footed rural guerrilla who had left Carew dumbfounded with his 70km march over icebound mountains – somehow couldn’t manage it in seven hours.

  Another explanation, from the same annalist, is that the various chieftains wasted time arguing over who took precedence, before compromising on walking ‘shoulder to shoulder, and elbow to elbow’. Although modern historians tend to dismiss this alleged dispute as a lame excuse for the ensuing defeat, anyone who has ever attended an Irish political meeting will find this sort of self-defeating squabble quite believable.

  The Castlehaven Spanish later twisted the knife by claiming that the Irish forces deliberately dragged their feet on the journey. And there was confirmation of this from the Irish side, of all places. Ludhaigh O’Cleary says: ‘There was not the desire for battle nor anxiety to attack … they were timid, languid, slow, cowardly …’

  Only two things are clear: O’Neill made it to the hilltop by dawn, and O’Donnell didn’t. ‘O’Donnell with his column wandered about all night, owing to his guides’ ignorance of the route, and was far off,’ recalls Philip O’Sullivan. Bustamante even claims – and this is contentious – that the stealthy approach of the attackers was thwarted when O’Donnell shattered the silence by calling his troops into action prematurely. ‘He uttered a false alarm,’ says the Spaniard, ‘when he should have been coming up quietly.’ But if the Spaniard thought that O’Donnell’s alleged clanger had awakened the dozing English, he was completely mistaken.

  Blount, like Águila, had never been asleep.

  The English commander, fully dressed in his multiple layers of clothing and no doubt smoking his pipe, heard the news as he sat conferring with Carew and marshal Richard Wingfield in his ‘house of turf’ just half an hour before dawn. For several nights now, he had given up any attempt to sleep. Now, exhausted, he was about to call off the alert for the night. He had been warned of an impending attack, but had concluded that ‘some accident’ had postponed it. If O’Neill had been delayed for another half-hour, Blount might have been sound asleep.

  There was a thunder of hooves outside the hut as a cavalryman galloped up, dismounted and burst through the door. ‘My Lord,’ he said breathlessly, ‘it is time to arm, for the enemy is near unto the camp.’

  At around the same time as the English scout noticed those dancing pinpoints of light, the thousand troops in Henry Power’s emergency flying column were patiently waiting below Ardmartin Ridge, on the Kinsale side. Captain Power had known since 11pm that an attack was imminent, and believed he could anticipate the route O’Neill would choose.

  Ardmartin Hill is part of a long ridge that arcs around Kinsale town to the north and west. To the east of this ridge (to the right if you look at a modern map) is Camphill or Spital Hill, the site of Blount’s camp. Ardmartin Hill, where Donough O’Brien had his first camp at Liscahane Mór, is further to the west and left. Beyond this ridge, much further north, is Coolcarron Hill. Between the two heights is a long valley sweeping from right to left, from east to west, down to low, boggy ground near the River Bandon. (Think of it, schematically, as something like a modern Wi-Fi symbol of two arcs and a dot. The dot is Kinsale town. The inner arc is Ardmartin Ridge, with Blount’s camp to the right and Ardmartin Hill a bit left of centre. The outer arc is the high ground around Coolcarron, and between the two arcs is the valley.)

  Captain Power reckoned that O’Neill would either approach directly over Ardmartin Hill, or bypass the ridge by going along the valley, circling around, and approaching the town from the west. From the seaward base of Ardmartin, Power could cover both routes.

  And sure enough, just as dawn broke, Power spotted O’Neill ‘very nigh the place where I was’.

  Blount jumped to his feet and called for his horse. While Marshal Wing-field dashed off to double-check the scout’s report, Blount rapidly implemented a plan he had prepared days beforehand. Since Águila was the main threat, he needed to keep the bulk of his troops in place to guard the town.

  He turned to Carew.

  —You will be responsible for defending us against attack from Kinsale, he instructed. Five regiments under Carew and O’Brien were lining up to guard the two main English camps.

  Blount was taking a huge gamble. This left him with only around 1,200 infantrymen to face O’Neill, compared to the 5,000 or so that he left behind. But the canny commander was taking nearly all his cavalry – around 300 to 400 men. They would be more useful in the open field.

  Wingfield galloped back to confirm that O’Neill’s troops were indeed ‘making towards the town in good order of battle’ by way of the hilltop. Power, his flying column dwarfed by the might of the insurgent army, was holding the line against them, barely 365 metres downhill.

  Blount mounted his horse and rode off towards the flashpoint, pausing to identify a spot in front of the town where he felt the Irish advance should be halted. It was not needed – they would never get that far.

  Hugh O’Neill was standing on the bleak hilltop, watching the light of dawn reveal the full strength of his opposition. From the 88-metre height of Liscahane Mór he could clearly see the main English camp to his left – bastioned, forbidding, virtually impregnable. Ahead of him, Josiah Bodley’s formidable trenchworks zig-zagged across the devastated terrain to Donough O’Brien’s second camp, itself a masterwork of earthen ramparts and trenches hollowed twice as deep as a grave. Beyond it, almost invisible in the mist and drizzle, lay his prize – the town of Kinsale.

  Another black tempest was moving in from the Atlantic. Recent storms had featured the sort of crashing thunder that seemed to explode right inside a man’s head. One English officer memorably compared it to having a stake driven into your skull while rocks fell on you from the skies: ‘It lightened and thundered accordingly, as if the stones from heaven should fall on Sisera’s head,’ wrote Thomas Gainsford, invoking the Biblical figure who was killed when a tent-peg was hammered through his cranium.

  Across the entire murky panorama, O’Neill could discern thousands of shadows forming into battle order. The five regiments under Carew and O’Brien were lining up to guard the two main English camps. Their massed pikes bristled from the ranks like poisonous spines from some aggressive creature disturbed in its lair. Directly in front of O’Neill stood the thin line of Henry Power’s flying column. And more enemy cavalry was already thundering across towards it in the half-light. Directing and orchestrating the army was his old nemesis, Charles Blount.

  It was a daunting sight, according to Philip O’Sullivan: ‘[The route to town] was very strongly fortified with a trench, ditch, towers and cannon,’ he writes. ‘The soldiers were under arms, and the horses were bridled. Moreover, they were superior in numbers to the Irish.’ Clearly, the only su
rprise in this ‘surprise attack’ was experienced by Hugh O’Neill.

  Meanwhile, around half of O’Neill’s 6,000-strong force was still out there somewhere in the misty bogland behind him. According to Philip O’Sullivan, O’Donnell’s division ‘had not arrived’.

  And yet … O’Neill still had the upper hand. He had reached the designated spot on time. He had around 2,600 men by his side – his own 2,000 troops, Tyrrell’s 400 Leinstermen, and Ocampo’s 200 Spaniards. Crucially, he had the advantage of the high ground. If he stayed put, the English would have to exhaust their weary, malnourished horses in an uphill charge against his massed pikes.

  O’Neill waited for a while, watching and analysing. In the bogland below, Blount did the same thing. But it was O’Neill who blinked first.

  To the astonishment of the English and the fury of Ocampo’s Spaniards, he gave up his only advantageous position and ordered his troops to retire, back down the hill, away from the English, and away from his Spanish allies in Kinsale.

  Why did he do it? What on earth possessed him? It is one of the most hotly debated controversies in the entire saga, and unless any of us meets O’Neill in the afterlife, we will never know for certain. In abandoning a defendable position for the open countryside, he was pushing his luck to the uttermost. An army caught in an open field could defend itself only by mimicking the structure of a fort, with pikes for walls and rigid bastions of musketeers at each corner. It required iron discipline. Were his men up to it?

  The most obvious reason for his retreat was that he had been overawed by the opposition and decided to withdraw to fight another day. In his detailed journal of the battle, an unidentified English soldier known only as ‘IE’ reported this as fact: ‘Discovering [us] stopped at the foot of the hill and, anon, thinking it to be no day for him, [he] retired the troops.’ Another English officer agreed, but added that O’Neill had felt himself ‘cozened’ or betrayed by the Spanish. ‘Seeing himself both out of his way and cozened … [he] began to make his retreat.’

  Philip O’Sullivan says that ‘in the state of things … [he] put off the enterprise to another time’. But he adds, preposterously, that Ocampo and the other Spanish officers persuaded him to do so. In reality, these officers were furious at his retreat. According to Bustamante, they warned him it was a bad decision, ‘but although they told him so emphatically, there was no stopping him’. Ocampo later confirmed this to the English. He said he had pleaded with O’Neill to ‘embattle his men’ and join with Águila.

  Another theory is that O’Neill retreated to prevent Blount driving a wedge between his hilltop force and his latecomers. One Spanish captain later quoted O’Neill as giving that reason. An alternative explanation is that O’Neill left because Águila had not sallied out to meet him as promised. But this might be more convincing if he had stayed around a little longer than thirty minutes or so.

  Perhaps the most incredible explanation was given by the Irish annalist. O’Neill’s advance had been too swift and efficient. When dawn revealed his position, he found himself at the front line before he was ready to fight. According to Ludhaigh O’Cleary, it was not so much a retreat, more a temporary withdrawal to reorganise. ‘They tried to go a short distance that they might regain their ranks and good order.’ Blount agreed that it gave that appearance, but he believed it was a feint. ‘[O’Neill] retired beyond a ford at the foot of that hill, with purpose (as he feigned) till his whole army were drawn more close.’

  The main reason may have been much simpler. All this time, the English were already moving up the hill towards him. Carew maintains that Blount’s entire attack force had ‘advanced towards them’ and Henry Power says he began to ‘draw towards them with my regiment’. Blount was already going on the offensive, and O’Neill had to react.

  Whatever his reasons, O’Neill took the fateful choice that was to cost him a battle, a campaign, a war and a kingdom. He led his men off the peak, down the far side, and across a stream. Presumably he thought that the advancing English would see him off, but not actually pursue him.

  He thought wrong.

  Blount sniffed the air and smelled vulnerability. It is an axiom of war that an enemy retreat means nothing unless you take advantage of it. Throughout the late 1500s, battle after battle had shown how an infantry body in retreat could be overtaken and defeated by a pursuing cavalry. A retreating commander sought the safety of distance. The speed and adaptability of the pursuers’ horses cancelled out that security. As an expert military theorist, Blount knew this. He spurred his horse up to the abandoned hilltop. According to IE, he wanted ‘to see what profit could be made of an enemy thus troubledly retiring’.

  He wasn’t expecting a battle. He was just looking for an opportunity.

  Just then, as though in proof of Carew’s theory that the Jesuits could conjure up bad weather, a thunderstorm slammed into the side of the hill, blinding the pursuers for a full fifteen minutes and covering the retreat. The weather cleared to reveal that the Irish had crossed the stream at the landward foot of the hill and had formed themselves into units with their cavalry at the rear.

  The Irish veterans were uneasy. ‘They were in fear,’ wrote IE, ‘[because] there was not before them any place of so good advantage … as those they had passed and quitted.’

  Blount decided to edge forward with caution. The Irish still outnumbered his force by at least four to one. He ordered his infantry to descend the hilltop to the stream the Irish had just crossed. It was a move to test the Irish resolve, and it paid off. There was only a limited amount of skirmishing, but the bulk of the Irish force kept retreating westward along the valley to another ford.

  Henry Power’s flying squadron was in the thick of this action. ‘The rebels, finding my Lord prepared to fight, drew back both horse and foot,’ he wrote. ‘Notwithstanding, we went on, and upon a ford they made a stand and skirmished with us, from whence they were beaten back to another ford not far distant.’

  Still, Blount was reluctant to attack. He didn’t want to be suckered into one of O’Neill’s notorious tiger traps, in which a pursuing army could be lured into a hidden valley filled with deadly pitfalls or concealed reinforcements. Pausing, he called for a scout who knew the area intimately.

  —Think carefully, he said. Is there any feature of this landscape the enemy could use to their advantage?

  The scout shook his head.

  —None, my Lord, he replied. There is only a fair champaign.

  ‘A fair champaign’ – those poetic words, signifying an open plain, were music to Blount’s ears. At long last, he had O’Neill where he wanted him. There was no escape – if not quite as far as the eye could see, certainly for as far as a man could run. This open plain was an agoraphobic’s hell. It was O’Neill’s worst nightmare. It was Blount’s dream come true.

  This moment, rather than any other, was the decisive point in the Battle of Kinsale. The serious fighting had yet to begin, but Blount had looked at the future exchanges in the game and realised, like a chess master ten moves from the end, that victory was almost certainly in his grasp.

  —Follow them and attack, he ordered.

  From the Irish ranks, Alférez Bustamante watched grimly as the English closed in. He counted a thousand infantry and three hundred cavalry in the pursuing force, but despite O’Neill’s numerical superiority, the Irish were already on the back foot. After a minor skirmish at the first ford, they had called a further retreat – much to the disgust of the Spanish officers – and had forded another stream. ‘We went across another river to a wide-open field where our squadrons re-formed and waited for the enemy’s next move,’ Bustamante recalled.

  Now on solid ground, with the river between them and the English, O’Neill’s insurgents finally made a serious stand. Ocampo and his colleagues, experts in tercio formation, arranged the Irish infantry into the classic Spanish square, a complex exercise even among the most experienced troops. For many of O’Neill’s Ulstermen, it was already second natur
e. For the Cork volunteers and the wilder woodkern, it must have been awkward and claustrophobic. Their joy lay in the flying attack, an athletic manoeuvre in which Irish light cavalry would burst from cover and swoop down upon the unsuspecting enemy with their own foot soldiers hanging onto their saddles like skateboarders gaining speed from the tailgate of a truck. They would detach at the point of contact: the foot soldiers would cut a swathe through the surprised enemy, while the horsemen would hurl their short spears. With no stirrups, the horsemen constantly fell off, but would simply vault back on again like circus performers. ‘In swiftness, they equal and sometimes surpass the horses,’ marvelled one witness. ‘They mount their horses seizing them by the left ear.’

  Rider and foot soldiers would reunite for the equally swift retreat into the concealing woods. The idea of staying in one place and weathering the shock of a charge must have seemed to them an illogical, and probably quite terrifying, idea.

  Shane Sheale, O’Neill’s trumpeter, was an eyewitness on the Irish side. He watched carefully as O’Neill’s 6,000-strong force fell into position. He counted twenty ensigns with 300 men under each flag. But there was one force missing. Contentiously, Sheale maintained that the deputy leader of the insurgents was still out there in the wild, wandering somewhere in the drizzly miasma, ‘severed from them by reason of a mist in the morning’.

  The most significant battle of the entire rebellion was about to begin … and Red Hugh O’Donnell was not going to be part of it.

  Both sides took time to organise, but by mid-morning the situation was clear. At the western end of the valley behind Ardmartin Ridge, Blount’s 1,200 infantry and 400 horsemen were lining up on the east side of a stream that seemed fordable only at one point. Some insurgent musketeers were stationed at the same side, guarding the passage. Beyond the river, on firm ground, the insurgents were lined up in two units – O’Neill’s main battle force and a detachable flying column comprising Tyrrell’s Irish and Ocampo’s Spanish. Most of the Irish cavalry was behind them, held in reserve. O’Donnell was either nowhere in sight or commanding a rearguard far off to the east, according to which source you believe.