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

  Having paid £10 to the office of arms and twenty angels for the hire of the gown, the first Earl of Tyrone tipped the trumpeters forty shillings and returned in triumph to Ulster.

  St Leger’s policy of conciliation was producing results, but others at court sought subjugation not co-operation, and their advice gained favour. When Henry VIII died in 1547, he was succeeded by his ten-year-old son, now Edward VI. Real power was exercised by Lord Protectors. St Leger was sidelined and then recalled in 1551. The Lord Deputies who came after him were determined on conquest and on the imposition of the Protestant religion on Ireland. In November 1551 the very first book to be printed in Ireland was published. It was the Book of Common Prayer, in which was set out the form of worship now by command to be followed in all the churches of Ireland.

  Episode 53

  RELIGIOUS STRIFE AND PLANTATION

  A heresy and a new error sprang up in England, through pride, vainglory, avarice and lust, and through many strange sciences, so that the men of England went into opposition to the pope and to Rome. And they styled the king Chief Head of the Church of God in his own kingdom. New laws and statutes were enacted ... they destroyed the orders, namely the monks, canons, nuns and the four poor orders, i.e. the orders of the Minors, Preachers, Carmelites and Augustinians; and the livings of all these were taken up for the king. They broke down the monasteries, and sold their roofs and bells.... They afterwards burned the images, shrines and relics, of the saints of Ireland and England; they likewise burned the celebrated image of Mary at Trim, which used to heal the blind, the deaf, and the crippled; and they also burned the Bachall Íosa, the staff of Jesus, which was in Dublin, performing miracles from the time of St Patrick ...

  This account, taken from the Annals of the Four Masters, reflects the widespread alarm created by the introduction of the Protestant Reformation into Ireland in the sixteenth century. Yet Donegal Abbey and its sister foundation at Drowes, where these annals were compiled, were safe for the moment. It was in the English Pale and other fertile plains within easy reach of Dublin that the crown’s new religious policies had their most immediate impact. The Palesmen, as they often called themselves, were horrified—they, the descendants of Norman and English conquerors, were genuinely loyal to the crown, but nearly all of them remained devout Catholics, viewing Protestant doctrine as heresy. Many of them had relatives who held ecclesiastical office and were now facing dismissal for refusing to use the Book of Common Prayer in church.

  In addition, rich monastic lands in eastern Ireland were either seized by the crown or granted to recently arrived royal officials, men known as the ‘New English’. For example, Nicholas Bagenal, a knight from Staffordshire appointed marshal of the king’s army in Ireland, was granted the confiscated lands of Newry Abbey in south Down. The Palesmen, soon to be known as the ‘Old English’, were having their loyalty tested to the limit.

  The drive to introduce Protestantism was particularly vigorous during the reign of Edward VI. But when Edward died in 1553, his successor, Queen Mary, immediately restored the Catholic religion. The Old English citizens of Kilkenny city were overjoyed and celebrated in front of St Canice’s Cathedral:

  They rang all the bells ... they flung up their caps to the battlement of the great temple, with smilings and laughings most dissolutely ... they brought forth their copes, candlesticks, holy water stock, cross, and censers, they mustered forth in general procession most gorgeously, all the town over, with Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis and the rest of the Latin litany.

  Queen Mary, however, gave her full support to those at court who thought that tough military action was the only lesson the rebellious Gaelic Irish would understand. Her commanders launched repeated campaigns into the interior. In an attempt to extend the frontiers of the Pale westwards, two midland counties were confiscated from the Irish there and renamed: Leix became ‘Queen’s County’ and Offaly was titled ‘King’s County’ after Mary’s husband, King Philip II of Spain—names these counties retained well into the twentieth century.

  An ambitious scheme was launched to ‘plant’ or colonise these two counties with loyal subjects. Two forts were renamed Maryborough and Philipstown in the hope that they would become flourishing towns. Government officials contemplated driving out and even killing all the Irish inhabitants of the area, but rejected this suggestion on the grounds that it would be, as one put it, ‘a marvellous sumptuous charge’. In the end it was only the Gaelic nobles who were either executed or expelled, and the native population was squeezed into one-third of the plantation area. In return for rent payable to the crown, land was allocated to ‘Englishmen born in England or Ireland’—most of the colonists, in fact, were families from the Pale.

  The plantation of Leix and Offaly was only a very limited success. The leading Gaelic families in the region, the O’Connors, O’Mores and O’Dempseys, rebelled at least fourteen times in the ensuing decades. The hope was that the royal government could make a profit: in practice, the cost of protecting the colonists and crushing the surviving dispossessed was ruinous. As Sir Henry Sidney reflected some twenty years later, ‘The revenue of both the countries countervails not the twentieth part of the charge, so that the purchase of that plot is, and hath been, very dear.’

  In 1558 Mary died and without an heir. Her successor was Elizabeth. It was during her long reign that Ireland was to be conquered from end to end by the English for the first time. To do that she had to concentrate on subjugating the most Gaelic part of Ireland, the province of Ulster.

  Episode 54

  SHANE THE PROUD

  By the middle of the sixteenth century the Tudor monarchs had recovered control of much of Ireland, but that did not include Ulster. At one time the earldom of Ulster had stretched round from Carlingford Lough, along the coasts of Antrim and Down and over to the Inishowen peninsula. But from the early fourteenth century onwards it slowly disintegrated.

  Emerging from their woody fastness of Glenconkeyne in the heart of the province, the descendants of Áedh Buidhe O’Neill—a former King of Tír Eóghain—crossed the lower Bann and carved out a new lordship for themselves from the shattered remnants of the Norman earldom. The Savage family was driven out of the Six Mile Water valley and hung on precariously at the tip of the Ards peninsula. The Magennises of Iveagh and the MacCartans of Kinelarty engulfed central and southern Co. Down, while Clann Aodha Buidhe—which means the ‘family of yellow-haired Hugh’—dominated a sweep of territory extending from Larne inland to Lough Neagh at Shane’s Castle and taking in also the castle of Belfast and north Down, including much of the Ards. This territory the English called ‘Clandeboye’ after the ruling family which had conquered it.

  Driven out of Co. Down, the MacQuillans conquered the area around Coleraine which became known as ‘The Route’, named from their ‘rout’, the usual contemporary term for a private army. Close by, a branch of the Hebridean MacDonnells, the Lords of Islay and Kintyre, made a new home in the Glens of Antrim. With every reverse they suffered in Scotland, fresh waves of MacDonnells arrived. Henry VIII had received this warning:

  The Scots inhabit now busily a great part of Ulster, which is the king’s inheritance; and it is greatly to be feared, unless in short time they be driven from the same, that they, bringing in more number daily, will ... with the aid of the king’s disobedient Irish rebels, expel the king from his whole seignory there.

  By the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign in 1558 that prediction had proved correct. In all of Ulster, only Carrickfergus, the port of Ardglass and Sir Nicholas Bagenal’s lands in Newry lay within the area under the crown’s full control.

  By far the most powerful man in Ulster was Shane O’Neill of Tyrone. Brutal, vindictive and drunken, Shane had driven his aged father, Conn Bacach, into the Pale, where he died soon after. Conn, created first Earl of Tyrone in 1542, had nominated Matthew, another son, as his heir, and this had been accepted in London. The problem was that the earl had married several times and had innumerable off
spring. By Gaelic law, each one of his sons could claim to compete to succeed him. In a fierce succession dispute, Shane had come out on top. He had murdered his half-brother Matthew, whom he claimed—probably correctly—to have been Conn’s illegitimate son by a blacksmith’s wife.

  To his own people he was Seaán an Díomais, Shane the Proud: arrogant, ruthless and wily, he was without rival in Tyrone. He aspired to dominate the Antrim Scots, the Clandeboye O’Neills and the O’Donnells of Tír Conaill. By 1560 so many Scottish mercenaries had entered his service that the viceroy, Sir William Fitzwilliam, sent a desperate appeal to the English government: ‘Send us over men that we may fight ere we die.’

  Though Queen Elizabeth refused to recognise Shane as Earl of Tyrone, at first she seemed to hope the problem would somehow go away. Then Shane swept south and launched an attack on the Pale. After that, in May 1561, he moved west against Calvagh O’Donnell, Lord of Tír Conaill. Calvagh’s wife, Catherine, seems to have become infatuated with Shane; certainly she led Calvagh into a trap while he was besieging a rebellious kinsman in Glenveagh. The O’Donnell chief was bound in chains, and Catherine became Shane’s mistress, only to be abused cruelly and cast aside soon after.

  The problem for Elizabeth was that Calvagh was at that time supposed to be an ally of the English crown. She sent over the Earl of Sussex as her viceroy. The earl forged his way into Ulster, only to find that Shane O’Neill had pulled back into the forests with his cattle. Cut off by floods and running out of supplies, Sussex had no choice but to make a humiliating retreat. In desperation the earl concocted a plan to poison Shane, with a contingency scheme—which he frankly explained to the queen—to murder the poisoner should he fail. Nothing came of this plan.

  Given an additional £2,000, reinforcements from Berwick and a supporting fleet, Sussex invaded again. This time he got as far as Omagh, where he slaughtered a great herd of Shane’s brood mares and cattle. However, he failed to make contact with the fleet to be revictualled and once again had to retreat ignominiously by the way he had come.

  The queen felt she had no recourse but to make her peace with Shane, and to this end she invited him to London.

  Episode 55

  THE FALL OF SHANE O’NEILL

  Unable to bring about his defeat on the battlefield, Queen Elizabeth swallowed her pride and invited Shane O’Neill, the ruler of Tyrone, to her capital. On 3 January 1562 Shane entered London, accompanied by the Earls of Kildare and Ormond, and with an escort of fifty gallowglasses. Bare-headed, with hair flowing onto their shoulders, wearing short tunics, heavy cloaks, and linen vests dyed saffron with urine, the warriors drew crowds of onlookers as large as those that had turned out to gape at native Americans and Chinese in the city a short time before. Shane would not allow Kildare, his cousin, and Ormond, kinsman of the queen, to leave his side for a moment.

  Next day at Greenwich, in the presence of ambassadors and all the court, Shane threw himself to the floor before Elizabeth. Then rising to his knees, he made a passionate speech in Irish, punctuated by howls which caused great astonishment. ‘For lack of education and civility I have offended ...’, he began, the words of his speech being translated into English by the Earl of Kildare. Elizabeth eventually agreed to recognise Shane as ‘captain’ of Tyrone on condition that he kept the peace for the next six months.

  Almost as soon as he was back in Ulster, Shane O’Neill was making devastating raids on his neighbours. Desperately attempting a last stand on an island on Lough Erne, Hugh Maguire, Lord of Fermanagh, penned a frantic appeal to the queen’s governor:

  I cannot scape neither by land nor by water, except God and your Lordship do help me at this need; all my country are against me because of their great losses and for fear, and all my men’s pleasure is that I should yield myself to Shane.

  A punitive expedition to Ulster led by the Earl of Sussex in 1563 failed to bring O’Neill to heel. To complete his domination of all of Ulster, Shane then prepared to strike at the MacDonnells of Antrim.

  As Shane bore down on the Glens in 1565, the Scots set their beacons ablaze on Fair Head and the high ground behind Torr Head. The men of Kintyre seized their weapons and manned their galleys, but it was already too late. Sorley Boy MacDonnell, who had been leading the defence of the Glens, fell back to join his brother James, and together they made a desperate last stand by the slopes of Knocklayd. Shane overwhelmed the Scots, as he triumphantly reported in a letter written in Latin and sent to Dublin Castle:

  God, best and greatest, and for the welfare of her Majesty the Queen, gave us the victory against them. James and his brother Sorley were taken prisoners, besides many of the Scottish nobility were captured, and great numbers of their men killed, amounting in all to six or seven hundred.

  James died of his wounds, Dunseverick fell, Ballycastle was taken, and—after Shane threatened to starve Sorley Boy to death—Dunluce capitulated. O’Neill had all Ulster in thrall, as he exultantly declared in a letter to Sir Henry Sidney:

  I am in blood and power better than the best of them.... My ancestors were Kings of Ulster, Ulster was theirs, and shall be mine. And for O’Donnell, he shall never come into his country if I can keep him out of it, nor Bagenal into the Newry, nor the Earl of Kildare into Lecale. They are mine; with this sword I won them, with this sword I will keep them. This is my answer.

  The queen was horrified that such slaughter had been claimed on her behalf, and she wrote to Sir Henry Sidney, her new Lord Deputy, to ask how ‘such a cankred dangerous rebel’ might be ‘utterly extirped’.

  Sidney’s invasion of the north in 1566, though it was supported by a fleet in Lough Foyle, failed to crush O’Neill. In the end it was Shane’s neighbours in Ulster who brought about his downfall. In 1567 as the O’Neills crossed the River Swilly at Farsetmore they met a furious onslaught of O’Donnells and MacSweeneys, as the annals record:

  They proceeded to strike, mangle, slaughter, and cut down one another for a long time, so that men were soon laid low, heroes wounded, youths slain, and robust heroes mangled in the slaughter.

  Shane’s warriors retreated into the advancing tide, there to be drowned or cut down. O’Neill himself fled eastward to take refuge with the MacDonnells in the Glens. It was an extraordinary decision, but perhaps Shane hoped that by openly associating with Sorley Boy he could buy protection. The MacDonnells prepared a feast at Glenshesk in an apparent mood of reconciliation. They ‘fell to quaffing’—as one report put it—and a quarrel broke out, during which O’Neill was hacked to death. Shane’s head was sent ‘pickled in a pipkin’ to Sidney, who placed it on a spike over Dublin Castle gate-arch. But many more campaigns would have to be fought before Ulster would be subdued.

  Episode 56

  A FAILED PLANTATION AND A BLOODY FEAST IN BELFAST

  The killing of Shane O’Neill did little to increase English power in Ulster. Queen Elizabeth did not feel she had money to spare for more expensive military expeditions. Perhaps private enterprise could achieve something there? Certainly Sir William Cecil, the queen’s secretary, thought so. Enterprising Englishmen could be encouraged to ‘plant’ or colonise parts of the province, build ‘haven towns’ and bring in ‘good husbandmen, plough wrights, cart wrights and smiths, and serve there under such gentlemen as shall inhabit there’. The queen was convinced and approved a scheme put forward by one of her Privy Councillors, Sir Thomas Smith. He obtained letters patent entitling him and his son, also called Thomas, to the lands of eastern Ulster held by the Clandeboye O’Neills. His plan was to remove all the Irish except for poor labourers, who were to be kept on to till the soil. Here, his publicity brochure proclaimed,

  Every Irishman shall be forbidden to wear English apparel or weapon on pain of death.... No Irishman, born of Irish race and brought up Irish, shall purchase land, bear office, be chosen of any jury.

  Cecil was so confident of this venture’s success that he invested £333 6s 8d in it.

  When he heard of it, Lord Deputy Sir William Fitzwi
lliam was furious. Had not Brian MacPhelim O’Neill, Lord of Clandeboye, recently been knighted for his service against Shane O’Neill of Tyrone? Actually Smith’s enterprise was doomed from the outset. Only around a hundred prospective colonists disembarked at Strangford village in August 1572. Led by Sir Thomas’s inexperienced son, the expedition moved north towards Newtownards, only to find that Sir Brian MacPhelim was burning any building which might give shelter to the English. Smith had to seek refuge in Ringhaddy Castle, and it was in vain that he appealed to Dublin for help. He was killed by his Irish servants in the following year, and his body was boiled and fed to dogs. By then a more ambitious enterprise was already under way.

  Walter Devereux, Earl of Essex, was so certain of success that he mortgaged most of his great estates in England and Wales to raise the £10,000 he thought was needed. Elizabeth, grateful for Essex’s service in foiling an escape attempt by Mary Queen of Scots, gave him title to most of Co. Antrim and money to cover half the cost of the thousand soldiers he had raised.