The Last Armada

by Des Ekin

  Fynes Moryson would have agreed. ‘They use no saddles,’ he said of the Irish cavalry, ‘[and] may easily be cast off from their horses, yet being very nimble, do as easily mount them again, leaping up without any help of stirrups, which they neither use nor have.’ In contrast, the heavily armed English used ‘deep war saddles’. Moryson believed the inactivity of the Irish cavalry left the infantry exposed and was ‘the chief cause of their overthrow’.

  In a recent RTÉ documentary, The Story of Ireland, the lack of stirrups was given as the main reason for the defeat.

  Yet this was a general disadvantage which proved fatal only at Kinsale, when O’Neill fought in the open. As Hiram Morgan observes, he must have wished he had stuck to Águila’s plan and remained on the ridge. Instead, by retreating, ‘O’Neill had pulled defeat from the jaws of victory.’

  THE TREACHERY THEORY

  Philip O’Sullivan suggested that the defeat was due ‘to somebody’s cunning or treachery’ and Papal Nuncio Mansoni claimed Águila’s familiarity with Blount created ‘grave suspicions’. Oviedo maintained that there was an enormous betrayal. In the 1880s it was being stated by at least one historian that ‘English gold … corrupted the integrity of the Spanish commander’.

  Historian Enrique García Hernán has recently re-examined this idea. He says there was much talk in Spain at the time that either O’Neill or Águila – or both – had reached an understanding with the English before the battle. This could explain O’Neill’s retreat and Águila’s inactivity that day. He says it is impossible to remove this suspicion, but adds that, in fairness, many other factors could have accounted for their behaviour.

  On the other hand, Hayes-McCoy says he can find no evidence of treachery. The theory is intriguing, but until someone finds the ‘smoking gun’ of firm evidence, we can only speculate.

  ANOTHER POSSIBILITY

  The word ‘panic’ has often been applied to the rout of the Irish troops at Kinsale. Drawing upon the popular notion that human beings degenerate to a primitive and bestial level when threatened, this viewpoint implies that O’Neill’s men stampeded like terrified cattle. An English account vividly fosters this image, saying that the Irish ‘ran confusedly’, discarding their weapons ‘for fear … to carry away their cursed carcasses’.

  Philip O’Sullivan appears to agree. ‘All were panic-stricken,’ he writes.

  However, recent research has shown that blind panic in crowds is largely a myth. Under threat, massed groups actually tend to co-operate and help each other. In my view, a more likely explanation for the infantry’s sudden disintegration was the creation of a compression wave or ‘crowd turbulence’. When crowds are tightly compressed, as at a sports match or rock concert, the slightest movement can rapidly gather powerful energy, amassing enough force to bend steel railings five centimetres thick.

  When the Irish cavalry punched into their own tightly packed foot soldiers, those in the front few ranks had to step back. The process gained momentum, creating an irresistible force wave. In his classic 1993 study of crowd disasters, Dr John J. Fruin says that when a critical density is reached, a crowd ‘becomes almost a fluid mass. Shock waves can be propagated through the mass, sufficient to lift people off their feet and propel them … three metres or more. People may be literally lifted out of their shoes and have clothing torn off.’ Once this compression wave surged through the ranks, it would have been impossible for even the most determined fighters to stay in place. It is one of the many ironies of Kinsale that O’Neill’s tightly packed tercio could resist a charge by enemy horsemen … but was forced under by friendly ones.

  THE CULTURE OF HONOUR

  We’ve already seen how O’Neill’s burning and looting of his neighbours’ territory – to him, the most natural way to behave – left his Spanish allies exasperated. I believe the ‘culture of honour’ also manifested itself to the disadvantage of the Irish on the day of the battle. The squabble over precedence on the night march is sometimes dismissed as a myth – but I suspect it was true, and that, seen in this context, it was pivotal. A chieftain could not afford to lose face. To accept a place behind one’s neighbour showed a dangerous weakness that could be exploited for decades. The inevitable delays may have proved fatal.

  Secondly, there was no true sense of solidarity between the Irish confederates: they simply didn’t trust each other. They saw no point in rushing to the aid of a neighbouring chieftain who had stolen their cattle before and would happily do so again. Seen from this perspective, the defeat and slaughter of a neighbour’s forces might not have been entirely unwelcome. They were confederates, but they were not allies.

  WHERE WAS THE BATTLE FOUGHT?

  So much for the ‘why’. Another unresolved question is ‘where’?

  Soon after the battle George Carew and Donough O’Brien ‘rode out to see the dead bodies’. O’Brien was particularly interested, because he had read an ancient prophesy forecasting the precise ford and hill near Kinsale where the Irish would be overthrown. Carew asked some locals to name the area. They supposedly responded with the names from the prediction.

  Infuriatingly, Carew doesn’t mention the names. It wouldn’t have proved the power of prophecy – but it would have saved decades of wrangling over the true site of the Battle of Kinsale.

  Today, a sign stands at Millwater, some 5km northwest of the town. It says: ‘Kinsale lies about three miles south, hidden behind the high ridge of hills on which the English Army stood. This ridge is called Ardmartin, and the battle was fought at its western end.’ There is little else to see apart from a pleasant patchwork of green and golden fields.

  Many historians agree that this was the battle site. One, Nora Hickey, says that as you approach the sign from the east, you are in the middle of the action: ‘The English troops controlled the hillside on the left, and the Irish armies stood on the lower ground to the right.’

  Of course, the battle covered a wide area, and the nearby locations of Whitecastle, Ardcloyne and Ballinamona bog have been suggested as possible settings for O’Neill’s last stand. In 1916, a local historian named Florence O’Sullivan drew from oral tradition to precisely pinpoint the location. It surrounded ‘the crossroads near the farmhouse of Mr Coleman of Milewater [aka Millwater] about half a mile inland from the near extremity of White Castle Creek’. Interestingly, he says the stream running into White Castle Creek was known locally as ‘the Ford of the Slaughter’.

  This is extremely valuable, since O’Sullivan was writing only four human lifetimes from 1601 – and it seems inconceivable that the location of such a cataclysmic event should not have been passed on from generation to generation.

  Recently, however, Damian Shiels, an expert in battlefield archaeology, has painstakingly overlaid a copy of the old picture map from Trinity College, Dublin (see picture section) on the modern ordnance survey map. He wrote that if the hilltop O’Neill reached at dawn was Liscahane Mór, and if the retreat was as depicted on the map, then the battle could not have been fought at Millwater but much further west, near what is now Dunderrow.

  With modern technology, it is probably only a matter of time before archaeologists establish the site for certain. In the meantime, if only someone could just find Donough O’Brien’s prophesy …

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  HONOURABLE TERMS, OR A THOUSAND DEATHS

  DON’T think it’s over. It’s far from over.

  That was the clear message from Águila as Christmas Day dawned to reveal a new Kinsale – a warscape in which the balance of power had dramatically shifted in favour of the English besiegers.

  Far from acknowledging defeat, the Spanish commander turned up the heat on Blount with a series of vigorous attacks. In a two-hour sortie that night, he drove Blount’s troops out of their trench and managed to sabotage six of the big guns. They broke through the trenchworks and stormed forward as far as O’Brien’s lower fort, where they were forced to retreat only after getting ‘a volley of shot in their teeth’.
Zubiaur reported that Águila’s men ‘attacked the enemy’s trenches, which are so deep that ladders were needed to scale them’, and killed five hundred infantry – a figure that seems to be wildly exaggerated.

  Blount wasn’t resting on his laurels, either. After giving his men a brief break on the afternoon of 24 December, he instructed Josiah Bodley to push on with the trenchworks.

  Despite the deaths of around a thousand men, the battle had not yet proved decisive. Águila still held the town. Storming it would still cost the English dearly. Zubiaur still held two ports and had a garrison in Bearhaven. Most encouragingly of all for the invaders, Hugh O’Neill was still out there with an army of up to four or five thousand men and still had the power to keep the English pinned down until either side sent reinforcements.

  Águila was down, but far from out. As soon as the battle was over, he sent a messenger to Hugh O’Neill.

  —Return to your siege camp, he ordered. We will reunite our forces, and attack the English afresh.

  He probably suspected that he was wasting his breath. What he didn’t realise was that, with the bodies of his fallen warriors yet to be buried, the mercurial, unpredictable Hugh O’Neill was already making secret plans to switch sides and offer his services to the English.

  It was a wretched, humiliated and deeply divided Irish army that gathered for a council meeting in Innishannon. Ludhaigh O’Cleary summed up the mood of self-loathing dejection: ‘Ill luck was evidently with [O’Neill and O’Donnell] … when they did not resolve to fight bravely, courageously, zealously, mercilessly in defence of their faith, fatherland and lives … their princes were left lying on the earth, their champions wounded, their chiefs pierced through …’

  Zubiaur concurred. ‘Many very brave people were scattered over the field,’ he wrote home. ‘The poor Irish who had declared against the Queen were stricken by grief.’ Their misery was compounded by the knowledge that ‘the heretic army and their allies were very happy’.

  The fragile web that had bound a disparate force together was rapidly disintegrating. Alliances were dissolved in accusations, inter-reliance was replaced by incrimination, faith was supplanted by finger-pointing.

  ‘There prevailed much reproach upon reproach, moaning and dejection, melancholy and anguish, throughout the camp,’ says the Irish annalist.

  One group, led by Donal Cam O’Sullivan Beare, argued for renewing the siege. They claimed that by carrying on the fight they would honour the sacrifice of those who had fallen.

  Others believed they should return to their individual homes and guard their territories against the inevitable English retaliation or against challenges from within their own clans.

  —My brother is planning to snatch the chieftaincy from me, one leader complained. I have to return to defend myself.

  Everyone sympathised. Few of the chieftains were so secure that they could not be supplanted by eager relatives in their absence.

  Hugh O’Neill’s position was, as usual, ambiguous. Bustamante clearly suggests that O’Neill was reluctant to return to Kinsale. But Philip O’Sullivan claims he wished to continue the battle. It is possible that O’Neill, the ultimate chameleon, was able to convey both impressions simultaneously.

  All eyes were on Hugh O’Donnell. But the ‘fighting prince of Donegal’ had become a tragic figure. His life’s dream had been the Spanish liberation of Ireland. Within hours, all had been lost. Shell-shocked and stunned, he had lapsed into a traumatic state in which unbearable angst alternated with a blind, uncontrollable rage: Red Hugh was experiencing the ‘red mist’.

  ‘O’Donnell was seized with great fury, rage and anxiety of mind,’ says the Irish annalist, ‘so that he did not sleep or rest soundly for the space of three days and three nights.’ O’Cleary says his followers even feared for his life. He adds, very perceptively: ‘Rage and anger had seized upon his soul, and he would have been pleased if he was the first who was slain …’

  To a modern therapist this could be a warning signal for the psychological phenomenon known as ‘survivor guilt’. Now recognised as an aspect of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Survivor Guilt occurs when survivors of combat, crash or natural disaster feel remorse at having come through the ordeal when others have perished. Sufferers often state, like O’Donnell, that ‘I should have died instead.’ Sometimes they feel guilt at having failed to do more to help. This self-blame is nearly always unjustified. O’Donnell’s intolerable grief may have been intensified by embarrassment at having arrived too late and done too little in the battle. In any event, the classic symptoms include anxiety and ‘hyperarousal’ with sleeplessness and outbursts of anger, and they match almost exactly O’Donnell’s symptoms as described by O’Sullivan and O’Cleary.

  We will never know which particular ailment, if any, made O’Donnell react to defeat in this way. However, we can be certain that he was in mental crisis. He was in no condition to make any major decision – let alone a fateful choice that would shape the destiny of an entire nation for four centuries.

  Which is exactly what he proceeded to do.

  When O’Donnell finally spoke, it was from the bitter depths of his rage. He wouldn’t go back home. Nor would he stay, either.

  —I will never fight with the Irish again, he thundered. And especially not in company with those who ran away at the very first blow.

  There was a stunned silence among the chieftains. Everyone knew he was talking about O’Neill and his Tyrone warriors.

  At that moment, it must have been clear that the rebellion was essentially over. The O’Neill-O’Donnell alliance had been severed, with the younger man questioning his leader’s courage and command. Without that cohesion, the confederation would never hold together.

  —I am leaving for Spain, O’Donnell said. I will petition the King personally and plead for more soldiers.

  The decision caused ‘violent lamentations and loud wailing cries’ among his followers. Because, although O’Donnell promised to return in March with twenty thousand Spaniards, his troops suspected that they would never see him again. It was, says O’Cleary, a plan formulated ‘in great grief’. That is a reasonable psychological explanation for an insane scheme. For any commander to abandon his troops, to quit the battlefield and to flee the country at such a crucial juncture is otherwise inexplicable, even inexcusable. The war was not lost on the battlefield of Kinsale – it was lost at a council meeting in a camp in Innishannon.

  O’Neill agreed to the plan ‘with reluctance’ and it was approved by the chieftains. Both leaders then wrote to inform Águila. The remaining Spanish captains argued vehemently with them, but they were talking to the chieftains’ backs. ‘In under an hour, everything was dismantled,’ says Bustamante.

  O’Donnell and his entourage arrived in Castlehaven on Saturday afternoon and broke the bad news to Zubiaur, who urged them not to give up. ‘I encouraged them, saying that God and Your Majesty would help them, starting from the beginning,’ he reported later to the King. He was taken aback when O’Donnell announced that he planned to sail for Spain the following day. He and quartermaster general Pedro Lopez de Soto used all their efforts to try to persuade him to remain in Ireland. They pointed out that his people would be helpless without him. ‘I urged him to stay and give courage to everyone,’ Zubiaur wrote. But he could see that Red Hugh’s spirit was broken. The admiral wrote sympathetically: ‘The poor lord was completely acabado’ – finished, worn-out, up against the ropes.

  On Sunday, 27 December, just three days after the battle, Hugh O’Donnell set sail on a Scottish merchant ship, never to return to Ireland.

  It was left to Donal Cam O’Sullivan Beare to gather up the remnants of the insurgency. He headed west to make a last stand at his faraway redoubt at Dunboy Castle in the western Beara Peninsula.

  —Do not lose courage, he wrote to Águila.

  However, unknown to any of the insurgents, Hugh O’Neill was secretly negotiating with the English. On the morning after the battle, h
e sent an emissary to Blount.

  —I am willing and desirous to become a subject of the Queen, he said, if she will deal justly with me. To redeem all my errors I will do all possible service to Her Majesty.

  The last sentence was quite remarkable. The man who had led the insurgency was offering not only to surrender – but to join Blount in fighting his own Spanish and Irish allies.

  While Blount sent the envoy back with a cool response, he left the door open for negotiations. The English commander didn’t trust O’Neill, but it suited his purpose to have time-out. With the northern Irish threat sidelined for the next couple of months, he could devote his full attention to the task of ousting Águila from Kinsale.

  Meanwhile, George Carew was busy plotting. He had taken no part in the battle at Kinsale and, throughout the entire siege, he was most noteworthy for having let O’Donnell slip past him in Tipperary. It irked him to think that the English heroes of the hour – Blount, Richard de Burgh, Christopher St Lawrence, and to a lesser extent Richard Wingfield – were all Essex’s associates. Carew, of course, was in the opposing faction at court. When Carew heard that the wounded Sir Henry Danvers was planning to travel to London with Blount’s account of the victory, he seethed with indignation. Rehabilitation of the former Essex group would lessen the power of his own cabal, the rival grouping led by Secretary Robert Cecil.

  No, he concluded. It couldn’t be allowed to happen.

  He prepared his own version of events, emphasising how he had acquired the battle plan for a bottle of whiskey. Blount had simply acted on his tip off. History was rewritten. It was he, George Carew, who was handing the Queen her great and glorious victory. Now all he needed was a messenger who was tough enough, and ambitious enough, to push himself beyond the point of human endurance in order to get Carew’s version to London first.

  —Fetch me Richard Boyle, he ordered.