A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes – Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Irish History: Fascinating Snippets of Irish History from the Ice Age to the Peace Process

by Jonathan Bardon

Dear and well-beloved, we greet you with whole heart, making you to know that by the grace of God we have arrived in our city of Waterford the first day of this present month of June.... Since our arrival we thank God both for a prey of a great number of beasts made by our nephew the Duke of Surrey, as well as for a ‘journey’ made upon MacMurrough, O’Byrne and the rest, to the discomfiture of the enemy. We have had a very good beginning, trusting in the Almighty that He will lead us, and that shortly, to a good conclusion of our undertaking.

  Shortly afterwards, however, the expedition began to fail. Richard recklessly forged into the dense woods of the mountains, where his army was worn down by repeated ambushes. In addition, the royal coffers were fast emptying. So unpopular was this expedition in England that the Duke of Lancaster raised a successful rebellion there. Richard had to hasten back, only to be made prisoner and be thrown into the Tower of London, from whence he was eventually taken away and murdered.

  Almost a century of internecine warfare followed in England as the Houses of Lancaster and York contested for the crown in what became known as the Wars of the Roses. Inevitably the lordship of Ireland was once more in peril. Most of the descendants of the original Norman colonists had either ‘gone native’ and become rebels or had returned to live more safely in England. A great many ordinary colonists, believing their prospects to be bleak in Ireland, also left the island, as a petition to Henry V from the Irish parliament of 1421 made clear:

  Day to day we are burdened with divers intolerable charges and wars, so that humble tenants, the artificers and labourers of the said land daily depart in great numbers from your said land to your kingdom of England and remain there, whereby the husbandry of your said land is greatly injured and disused and your said lieges greatly weakened in their power of resisting the malice of your said enemies.

  Henry, preoccupied with French campaigns, offered no help. The author of The Little Book on English Policy gave this warning in 1427:

  To kepen Yreland that it be not loste,

  For it is a boterasse and a poste,

  Undre England and Wales is another.

  God forbede but eche were othere brothere,

  Of one ligeaunce dewe unto the kynge.

  But most in Ireland felt no allegiance to the English crown, and the author pointed out that ‘the wylde Yrishe’ had regained so much of the lordship of Ireland that

  Our grounde there is a little cornere

  To all Yrelande in treue comparisone.

  This was a correct assessment. At the same time the Irish Council reported in desperation to Henry VI that ‘his land of Ireland is well-nigh destroyed, and inhabited with his enemies and rebels’, with the consequence that the royal writ only ran in an area around Dublin ‘scarcely thirty miles in length and twenty miles in breadth’.

  The council was referring to the ‘Pale’. The Dublin government had erected paling, put up fortifications, dug trenches, given grants towards the building of castles, appointed guards to hold the bridges, and assigned watchmen—paid by a tax called ‘smokesilver’—to light warning beacons when danger threatened. The Pale ran from Dundalk in the north, inland to Naas in Co. Kildare, and then back to the coast just eight miles south of Dublin at Bray. Other coastal towns such as Waterford, Cork and Galway also attempted to remain loyal to the English crown. They included Carrickfergus, described in 1468 as ‘a garrison of war ... surrounded by Irish and Scots, without succour of the English for sixty miles’. And on the main gate of Galway was inscribed:

  From the fury of the O’Flahertys, good Lord deliver us.

  The truth was, most of Ireland was beyond the Pale.

  Episode 46

  BEYOND THE PALE

  Just south-west of Newtownstewart, adjacent to the Mourne river in Co. Tyrone, stand the ruins of what is known locally as Harry Avery’s Castle. Built by Énrí Aimhréidh O’Neill, this castle with its polygonal curtain wall and high D-shaped towers is evidence that the Gaelic Irish had learned much from the English. Soon after it was built, however, large castles were going out of fashion, being too expensive to garrison, maintain and repair.

  With as much enthusiasm as the remaining Anglo-Irish barons, Gaelic lords began to build tower-houses. These were intended as residences, but at the same time they were constructed for defence—often at the expense of comfort. A typical tower-house was a single rectangular tall keep, at least twelve metres high and slightly tapered, with two towers flanking the main entrance. The dimly lit ground floor was the store-room, with a semicircular barrel-vault roof, temporarily supported by woven wicker mats until the mortar had set—it was important that the first-floor roof was not made of wood in case of an attack by fire. The upper storeys were reached by a narrow winding staircase up one of the towers, lit by arrow slits; this was always cunningly designed to allow the defender, coming down the stairs, and not the attacker coming up, to use his sword with his right arm. Food was cooked in braziers on the first floor and taken to the banqueting hall above. The lord slept on the uppermost storey under a gable roof shingled with oak. Tower-houses had cells, built-in latrines, window seats and secret chambers in hollows within the haunches of stone vaults. Some had as many as six storeys. A notable feature was a bold arch connecting the two flanking towers; here was a ‘murder hole’ for shooting down at, or dropping heavy stones on, or pouring boiling water over, assailants attempting to ram the door below. (Contrary to popular belief, boiling oil was not poured on attackers: it was much too expensive.)

  The ruins of tower-houses are present in every county, with the greatest concentration in Limerick and Down. Those in the counties of Dublin, Kildare, Meath and Louth were known as ‘ten-pound’ houses because they attracted government grants in an attempt to strengthen the defences of the Pale. Some, including the tower-house in Belfast by the River Farset in what is now Castle Junction, have long since been removed. Those at Blarney, Co. Cork, and Bunratty, Co. Clare, have become famous tourist attractions. Others, such as that in Donegal town built by the O’Donnells, became incorporated into larger castles at a later date. Anyone standing at Portaferry quay in Co. Down can see a remarkable number of tower-houses in all directions, including those at Strangford, Audleystown, Kilclief and Jordan’s Castle in Ardglass.

  The recovery of so much land by Gaelic lords ensured the spread of the old Gaelic way of life. Though still proudly regarding themselves as ‘English’, very many descendants of the first Norman conquerors had become completely gaelicised and virtually indistinguishable from their native neighbours. By the beginning of the fifteenth century it is likely than Irish was the language of at least ninety per cent of the population. Though Gaelic Ireland was fractured politically into innumerable lordships, it maintained a remarkable cultural unity. Indeed, it could be said that from the Outer Hebrides to the Dingle and Iveragh peninsulas in the far south-west of Ireland the Gaelic world knew a cultural unity not yet achieved in the English-speaking regions of the British Isles—the professional learned classes ensured that there was no difference between Gaelic in Scotland and Ireland until the seventeenth century. The North Channel formed a line of communication, not a barrier; the real cultural frontiers were the Highland Line, south of which lived Scots speaking English, and the boundary of the Pale, the anglicised region around Dublin, known by crown officials as the ‘land of peace’ and the rest of Ireland, which they named the ‘land of war’.

  As in the days before the coming of the Normans, Gaelic lords made sure the learned classes were well supported. Certain families, often guardians of church lands, became specialists: for example, the McGraths and O’Husseys were poets and historians; the O’Breslins were lawyers; the O’Duignans and MacCarrolls were musicians; and the O’Hickeys and O’Cassidys were physicians. Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn was one of many who celebrated this way of life. This is an extract from his poem ‘Fermanagh is the Paradise of Ireland’:

  None interfereth with any other in this earthly paradise;

  There is none bent on spoi
l, nor any man suffering injustice.

  There is no reaver’s track in the grass ...

  No misfortune threatening her cattle, no spoiler plundering her ...

  Fermanagh of the fortunate ramparts is the Adam’s paradise of Inisfail.

  That paradise would be shattered in the course of the sixteenth century.

  Episode 47

  GARRET MÓR FITZGERALD, THE GREAT EARL OF KILDARE

  As long as England was dislocated by the Wars of the Roses both the Gaelic lords and the warlords of Norman origin in Ireland were secure in their virtual independence. They only had each other to fear. English monarchs had almost no money to spare for Ireland. A stop-gap solution was to turn to a great lord in Ireland to shoulder the burden of government.

  The three most powerful Anglo-Irish lords were the Earls of Desmond, Ormond and Kildare. The problem with the FitzGeralds of Munster, Earls of Desmond, was that they had become too gaelicised and frequently rebelled. The Butlers, the Earls of Ormond, tended to back losers in the Wars of the Roses, and their lands were under constant attack from the Irish. The most suitable candidates for the post of royal governor were the FitzGeralds of Leinster, the Earls of Kildare, who possessed great estates adjoining the Pale.

  Then, in 1485, a new era began with the victory of the Lancastrian, Henry Tudor, at the Battle of Bosworth. The Wars of the Roses were over. How would the new Tudor monarch, Henry VII, govern Ireland?

  The royal governor since 1478 had been Garret Mór FitzGerald, the eighth Earl of Kildare. Henry VII was inclined to keep the Earl of Kildare in his post, but his trust was severely tested in 1487. An Oxford priest arrived in Dublin with a young boy, Lambert Simnel, who claimed to be the Earl of Warwick, the Yorkist candidate for the throne. The Earl of Kildare and many other lords gave him an enthusiastic welcome, proclaimed him king, and on 24 May solemnly crowned him in Christ Church Cathedral. Worse still, Kildare provided Simnel with an army which invaded England, only be routed at Stoke in June. Then embarrassing details emerged: the real Earl of Warwick was a prisoner in the Tower of London, and Lambert Simnel was proved to be an impostor.

  Henry VII magnanimously pardoned the earl. For his part, Kildare buried the hatchet with his deadly enemy the Earl of Ormond, for long the king’s ally. At a tense meeting between the two sides in St Patrick’s Cathedral Ormond’s representative, his bastard son Sir James of Ormond, fearing that his life was in danger, fled into the chapter house and bolted the door. At length tempers cooled, and a tentative reconciliation was arranged. A hole was cut in the door of the chapter house, and Sir James put his hand through the hole to shake hands with Garret Mór. This is the origin of the well-known Irish phrase ‘chancing your arm’.

  For a brief period Kildare was replaced as governor by the experienced English soldier Sir Edward Poynings. Poynings quarrelled with Kildare, charged him with treason, and sent the earl as a prisoner to England in the spring of 1495. Garret Mór, however, was able to disprove the charge of treason in the presence of the king. The earl’s swaggering before Henry so infuriated the Bishop of Meath that he shouted out: ‘You see the sort of man he is; all Ireland cannot rule him.’ ‘No?’, replied King Henry. ‘Then he must be the man to rule all Ireland.’ In 1496 the Earl of Kildare returned in triumph to Ireland as the king’ governor, newly married to Henry VII’S first cousin, Elizabeth St John. An agent of the king reported that Kildare’s return was widely welcomed:

  Now thanked be God the king hath peace in all the land without any great charge or cost to him. His grace could have put no man in authority here that in so short a space and with so little cost could have set this land in so good order as it is now but this man only.

  The Earl of Kildare covered all his own expenses to such an extent that Henry was able to withdraw his army from Ireland altogether. Others, of course, had to pay for the administration and for Kildare’s private army, known as the Guild of St George. Great sums of protection money were extracted from lesser lords; the Irish parliament was cajoled into allowing the earl to annex lands abandoned by Englishmen in the country; and—like many other powerful men—Kildare imposed what was known as ‘coyne and livery’, that is, the seizure of food and the quartering of troops on other people’s lands.

  The high point of the Great Earl’s long rule was a successful expedition against Ulick Burke, Lord of Clanricarde, and his Irish allies in Connacht, in 1504. At Knockdoe, ‘the Hill of the Axes’, Burke’s forces were shattered in the greatest battle fought in late medieval Ireland. The Annals of Ulster recorded that of nine battalions in Burke’s army ‘there escaped not alive of them but one thin battalion alone ... so that the field became uneven from those heaps of slaughter’. It had been a very long time since English royal power had been felt west of the River Shannon.

  When the Great Earl of Kildare died in 1513 of a gunshot wound while fighting the O’Mores, he was virtually the ruler of Ireland. The king had no hesitation in appointing his son, the ninth earl, known to the Irish as Garret Óg, as his governor. But Garret Óg was not the man his father had been, and the days of the Kildare hegemony were now numbered.

  Episode 48

  THE DECLINE OF THE HOUSE OF KILDARE

  When Garret Óg FitzGerald succeeded his father as the ninth Earl of Kildare in 1513, he was, without doubt, the most powerful lord in the land of Ireland. The county of Kildare was entirely in his possession, and he controlled further large tracts of land within an area comprising nine modern counties. He had been recently granted the valuable salmon fisheries of the River Bann and the customs of the Ulster ports of Ardglass and Strangford. He possessed countless head of cattle and over a thousand horses, the right to hold his own courts in Kildare, his own standing army which included gallowglass mercenaries from the Hebrides, and an impressive collection of castles. His income was further increased by various dues and charges imposed on his tenants. Every farmer on his estates of Carlow, for example, had to render to him one sheep out of every flock, a hen at Christmas, a dish of butter in May and another in autumn, and each dealer in beer paid four gallons for every brewing. Great numbers of lesser lords, including far-distant Gaelic chiefs, paid him protection money and regularly gave him the free use of their soldiers. In addition, the earl held the supremely powerful post of governor of Ireland.

  Henry VIII toyed with the idea of attempting to govern his Irish lordship without this man. In 1520 he summoned Kildare to England, where he kept him a virtual prisoner, and sent over Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, as his governor. Surrey did his best, but after two years he had expended nearly £20,000 with very little to show for it. Henry had expensive military commitments in France, and, after giving the job to the Earl of Ormond for a time, set Kildare free and reappointed him as governor. The great attraction of employing Garret Óg was that—by fair means and foul—he raised all his own revenue, thereby ensuring that Ireland was not a burden on the London exchequer.

  Garret Óg, however, proved an overmighty subject: for example, he quarrelled unendingly and ferociously with the Butlers of Ormond—for long the king’s faithful supporters—and led an expedition into Ulster without royal permission. In addition, the earl used the Gaelic custom, known as cuid oíche, which forced landholders to entertain him and his attendants for days on end without payment, insisting that his hounds be given the same rations as a man. The king also received numerous complaints of his imposition of coyne and livery, the enforced billeting and maintenance of the earl’s soldiers by local communities:

  After their harvests are ended there, the kernes, the gallowglass and other breachlesse soldiers with horses and horsegrooms, enter into the villages with much cruelty and fierceness, they continue there with great rapine and spoil, and they leave nothing else behind for payment but lice, lechery and intolerable penury for all the year after.

  King Henry once more summoned Garret Óg to London. After prolonged procrastination the earl did eventually consent to travel, but not before he had appointed his son Thomas as
deputy governor in his place and removed the king’s cannon from Dublin Castle, storing the guns in his own castle of Maynooth. Actually by the time he reached London, Garret Óg was dying—just like his father before him—mortally wounded by a gunshot wound he had received fighting the Irish in Leinster. The Spanish ambassador wrote to Emperor Charles V:

  The Earl of Kildare is here sick both in body and brain by the shot of an arquebus.... There is no hope of his recovery, so that he must not be counted among those who will serve your Majesty.

  Thomas FitzGerald, Lord Offaly, the earl’s eldest son, was so well known for his love of finery that he was called ‘Silken Thomas’. Later the Dublin attorney Richard Stanihurst described him as follows:

  He was of stature tall and personable, in countenance amiable, a white face and withal somewhat ruddy, delicately in each limb featured, a rolling tongue, a rich utterance, of nature flexible and kind, very soon carried where he fancied, easily with stubbornness appeased.

  Believing a report that his father had been executed, Silken Thomas melodramatically entered Dublin with a thousand men on 11 June 1534. Then with a bodyguard of 140 horsemen, clothed in coats of mail, he rode to St Mary’s Abbey, where the council was in session. There Silken Thomas surrendered the sword of state, resigned his office, and renounced his allegiance to the king before a terrified council.

  Episode 49

  THE REBELLION OF SILKEN THOMAS