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

  Setting out from Liverpool on 16 August 1573, Essex had to take shelter from a storm on the Copeland Islands before landing at Carrickfergus. Sir Brian MacPhelim thought it politic not to quarrel with such a powerful English noble; as Essex reported, ‘I took him by the hand, as a sign of his restitution to her Highness’s service.’ Relations between the two men soon became strained, however, after Essex seized thousands of cattle. Relations between Essex and his gentlemen colonists were hardly any better. In November the earl wrote in complaint to the queen:

  The adventurers, of whom the most part, not having forgotten the delicacies of England, and wanting the resolute minds to endure a year or two in this waste country, [have] forsaken me, feigning excuses to repair home where I hear they give forth speeches in dislike of the enterprise ... [and] the common hired soldiers, both horsemen and footmen, mislike of their pay.

  In the following year Essex was given the new title of ‘General Captain in All Ulster’, but his plantation was failing to take shape. In frustration, Essex hanged some Devon men for attempted desertion, and imprisoned Captain Piers, custodian of Carrickfergus Castle, for being too friendly to Sir Brian MacPhelim. Turlough Luineach O’Neill, the successor to Shane O’Neill in Tír Eóghain, was also offering friendship to Sir Brian, so the earl slaughtered a band of his followers taking refuge on a river island at Banbridge and invaded mid-Ulster, burning corn all down the Clogher and Blackwater valleys. Essex got as far as Derry, but the wily Turlough kept giving him the slip by disappearing into the forests and mountains.

  Peace was restored with Sir Brian, but this was to occasion an act of treachery. In October 1574 Essex and his principal followers were invited to a feast in Belfast Castle, Sir Brian’s tower-house which stood on ground now occupied by Castle Place in the centre of the city. The annals record:

  They passed three nights and days together pleasantly and cheerfully. At the expiration of this time, as they were agreeably drinking and making merry, Brian, his brother, and his wife, were seized upon by the earl, and all his people put unsparingly to the sword—men, women, youths, and maidens—in Brian’s own presence. Brian was afterwards sent to Dublin, together with his wife and brother, where they were cut in quarters. Such was the end of their feast.

  This cruelty did nothing to advance Essex’s cause. Nor did an act of equal barbarity carried out the following summer on Rathlin.

  Episode 57

  AN ENGLISH QUEEN, A SCOTTISH LADY AND A DARK DAUGHTER

  The MacDonnells, Gaelic-speaking Scots from the Western Isles, had carved out a powerful lordship for themselves in Ireland to add to their possessions in Islay and Kintyre. Centred on the Glens of Antrim, their Irish territory stretching from Larne to Coleraine, bristled with castles. Joining them were MacNeills, MacAllisters, MacKays and MacRandalbanes from Kintyre and Gigha, and, from the Rinns of Islay, the Magees after whom Islandmagee is named.

  The Lord of the Glens, Sorley Boy MacDonnell, was one of the most astute leaders in the Gaelic world. In the Isles he had made his peace with the Campbells and arranged the marriage of his brother’s widow, Lady Agnes (herself a Campbell) to the strongest ruler in Ulster, Turlough Luineach O’Neill of Tyrone. Finola, Lady Agnes’s daughter, was married in turn to Hugh O’Donnell, Lord of Tír Conaill. Finola—known as Inghean Dubh, the ‘dark daughter’—herself exercised formidable power in Donegal.

  These arrangements formed the basis of a powerful coalition. Had Elizabeth been better informed, she might have made a useful ally of Sorley Boy. Instead, in 1575, the queen approved the plan of her general in Ulster, the Earl of Essex, to smash the power of the MacDonnells. A fleet was fitted out in Carrickfergus harbour, including three frigates under the command of Francis Drake, already famous for seizing a Spanish treasure convoy. Captain John Norris (after whom Mountnorris in Co. Armagh is named), the son of a Groom of the Stole executed for having an affair with Anne Boleyn, took command of the soldiers crowding on board the vessels bound for Rathlin Island.

  The assault fleet reached Arkill Bay on the east side of the island on the morning of 22 July 1575. Captain Norris’s men, Essex reported, ‘did with valiant minds leap to land, and charged them so hotly, as they drave them to retire with speed, chasing them to a castle which they had of very great strength’. The castle, with many women and children inside, was pounded by ship’s guns for four days. But without a well, and with its wooden ramparts destroyed by red-hot cannon-balls, it could hold out no longer. At dawn on 26 July the garrison surrendered on condition their lives were spared; but, it was reported,

  The soldiers, being moved and much stirred with the loss of their fellows that were slain, and desirous of revenge, made request, or rather pressed, to have the killing of them, which they did all.... There were slain that came out of the castle of all sorts 200.... They be occupied still in killing, and have slain that they have found hidden in caves and in the cliffs of the sea to the number of 300 or 400 more.

  Essex passed on to the queen information he had received from a spy that Sorley Boy ‘stood upon the mainland of the Glynnes and saw the taking of the island, and was like to run mad for sorrow (as the spy saith), turning and tormenting himself, and saying that he had then lost all that ever he had’.

  Elizabeth did not condemn this cruelty: instead she promoted Norris and gave Drake a special audience at court. And to Essex the queen wrote in her elegant italic script:

  If lines could value life; or thanks could answer praise, I should esteem my pen’s labour the best employed time that many years had lent me ... your most loving cousin and sovereign E.R.

  In spite of this apparent victory, Essex was running out of men and money. He was a long way from realising his project of conquering and colonising Ulster. His optimism remained unbounded. He dreamed of making Belfast a great port: ‘I resolve not to build but at one place; namely, at Belfast; and that of little charge; a small town there will keep the passage, and shall command the plains of Clandeboye.’ And he added: ‘For my part I will not leave the enterprise as long as I have any foot of land in England unsold.’

  But even the queen knew he had failed. Essex pulled back in despair to Dublin, where in September 1576, rather suddenly, he died of dysentery. He was thirty-six years old. Just how quickly English royal power had faded in Ulster is reflected in an urgent memorandum sent from Carrickfergus less than four years later:

  Here is a great bruit of 2000 Scots landed in Clandeboye. Turlough Luineach’s marriage with the Scot is the cause of all this, and if her Majesty does not provide against her devices, this Scottish woman will make a new Scotland of Ulster. She hath already planted a good foundation; for she in Tyrone, and her daughter in Tyrconnell, do carry all the sway in the North.

  Elizabeth could do nothing in response: she had a rebellion to crush in the far south of Ireland.

  Episode 58

  ‘WARRING AGAINST A SHE-TYRANT’: HOLY WAR IN MUNSTER

  In February 1565, by the Knockmealdown Mountains in Co. Waterford, Gerald FitzGerald, the fifteenth Earl of Desmond, and Thomas Butler, the tenth Earl of Ormond, met in furious battle. These descendants of the first Norman conquerors, the two most powerful warlords in Munster, were then summoned to court: there Queen Elizabeth sternly charged them with waging a private war in her realm. They were bound over for £20,000 each to keep the peace and sent back to Ireland.

  Ormond thereafter behaved himself, but Desmond did not—he could not endure the undermining of his authority by the crown officials, and, like so many of his vassals, he was appalled by the establishment of a Protestant church with the queen as its supreme governor. In 1567 the Lord Deputy had him arrested, forfeited his bond for £20,000 and dispatched the earl to spend the next five years languishing in the Tower of London. During his absence his cousin James FitzMaurice FitzGerald and his brother Sir John of Desmond managed the earl’s vast properties as best they could, deeply resenting growing English interference.

  In 1569 James FitzMaurice and Sir John led
an angry revolt, besieging Cork and the Ormond capital, Kilkenny. The colonel commanding Elizabeth’s forces, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, crushed the rebellion with a savagery unusual even for that time. In six weeks he took twenty-three castles and in each one slaughtered all those inside, men, women and children; and as every defeated rebel made abject surrender he had to walk down a grisly corridor of severed heads.

  The Earl of Desmond was allowed back to Ireland in 1573. A man who by several accounts was not the full shilling, Desmond threw off his English clothes and put on Irish dress as a warning that he would not tolerate further erosion of his traditional power by Protestant heretics. His cousin James FitzMaurice, deciding to seek the aid of Catholic rulers, sailed to France with his wife and children in 1575. Eventually he managed to obtain an audience with Pope Gregory XIII in Rome, who provided him with a thousand Italian swordsmen. On their way to Ireland there was an irritating delay when King Sebastian of Portugal commandeered the force to fight in Morocco. FitzMaurice, unlike some of those who had been forced to fight the Moors, survived the experience to reassemble his Italians and to recruit some Spanish soldiers. Hearing of these preparations, the royal council in Dublin issued instructions to naval captains:

  Make sail along the west and north-west sea coasts, for the pursuit, apprehending, and plaguing of any traitors or malefactors adherent to the proclaimed traitors.... Search all passengers for letters, books, ciphers, or other kind of suspect matter, that may tend either to the defacing of religion or to the dishonour of the Queen’s most excellent Majesty.... Make stay of any French, Spanish, Flemish, or Scottish ships and convoy them into the Shannon.

  Sailing from Corunna, the force managed to evade these patrols to put in at Smerwick harbour in Co. Kerry on 18 July 1579. A spy reported:

  The traitor upon Saturday last came out of his ship. Two friars were his ancient-bearers.... A bishop, with a crozier-staff and his mitre, was next the friars. After came the traitor himself at the head of his company and went to seek for flesh and kine.

  At Smerwick they built a fort which became known as Dún an Óir, the ‘fort of gold’. With them was an English priest, the pope’s emissary, who had helped FitzMaurice to compose his propaganda:

  The cause of this war is God’s glory, for it is our care to restore the visible honour of the holy altar which the heretics have impiously taken away. The glory of Christ is belied by the heretics, who deny that his sacraments confer grace ... and the glory of the Catholic Church they also belie.

  This war is undertaken for the defence of the Catholic religion against the heretics.... We are warring against a she-tyrant who has deservedly lost her royal power by refusing to listen to Christ in the person of her vicar, and through daring to subject Christ’s Church to her feminine sex on matters of faith.

  Soon Sir John of Desmond joined his cousin FitzMaurice, and swordsmen and gallowglasses from lordships all over Cork, Kerry, Limerick and Tipperary thronged to join the insurrection. Shortly afterwards FitzMaurice was killed while attempting to seize some horses, and Sir John of Desmond took command. Eventually, after much hesitation, the Earl of Desmond himself joined the revolt.

  For more than a year a vicious war raged across the south, neither side showing any mercy. On the English government’s behalf, the Earl of Ormond laid waste extensive tracts of his rival’s earldom, while the FitzGeralds sacked the town of Youghal. Then Pope Gregory sent more Italians and Spaniards, who joined their compatriots at Smerwick in September 1580. There was to be a terrible outcome.

  Episode 59

  THE PLANTATION OF MUNSTER

  For more than a year the forces of the crown had been engaged in crushing a great rebellion led by the FitzGeralds in Munster. As one by one the insurgent castles capitulated, Lord Deputy Grey closed in on the Dingle peninsula during the autumn of 1580. Here at Smerwick harbour a force of Italians and Spaniards sent to help the Irish prepared to make a desperate last stand in the fort known as Dún an Óir. Grey waited until Admiral Sir William Winter at last sailed in with his squadron. Then he took action:

  The sailors took some culverins quietly out of the ships at night and dragged them by the nearest way and set them in position. The soldiers meanwhile on the other side set up their great pieces for battery against the walls and both of them at once played for four whole days upon the fort.... As they saw no succour coming from Spain nor from Desmond, they raised the white flag and begged for a parley.

  When the commander of the joint Spanish and Italian expeditionary force admitted that they had been sent by Pope Gregory in defence of the Catholic faith, the Lord Deputy replied to him that the pope was ‘a detestable shaveling, the right Antichrist and general ambitious tyrant over all right principalities, and patron of the diabolical faith’. Nevertheless, the Italian hugged the Lord Deputy’s knees, believing that he had capitulated on the promise of his men’s lives. Officers came out with their banners trailing and surrendered the fort. ‘And then’, the Lord Deputy chillingly reported to the queen, ‘put I in certain bands, who straight fell to execution. There were 600 slain.’ There was no reproof from the queen: indeed, she wrote on top of Grey’s despatch in her own hand:

  The mighty hand of the Almighty’s power hath shewed manifest the force of his strength ... in which action I joy that you have been chosen the instrument of his glory which I mean to give you no cause to forethink.

  The quelling of the rebellion took another year. Its military leader, John of Desmond, was killed at the beginning of 1582, and his head was forwarded to the Lord Deputy as a ‘new year gift’. The Earl of Desmond himself was found hiding in a cabin a year later and was summarily slaughtered; his head was sent to Queen Elizabeth.

  Great tracts of the south of Ireland were left in ruins and a terrible famine swept across the land. The Lord Deputy’s secretary, Edmund Spenser, had witnessed the massacre at Smerwick. Now he described the suffering of the ordinary people in Munster:

  Notwithstanding that [Munster] was a most rich and plentiful country, full of corn and cattle, yet ere one year and a half they were brought to such wretchedness, as that any stony heart would have rued the same. Out of every corner of the woods and glens they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs would not bear them; they looked like anatomies of death, they spake like ghosts crying out of their graves; they did eat of the dead carrions, happy were they if they could find them, yea, and one another soon after.... And if they found a plot of watercresses or shamrocks, there they flocked as to a feast for the time, yet not able long to continue there withal; that in a short space there were none almost left, and a most populous and plentiful country suddenly made void of man and beast.

  Walter Raleigh, a captain who had superintended the slaughter at Smerwick, was one of many who argued that now was the time to colonise the confiscated estates of the Earl of Desmond and his adherents. A hasty survey was made in 1584, and finally in 1586 the decision was taken to settle people of English birth on the confiscated lands. The lands were divided into portions of between 12,000 and 4,000 acres, each to be granted to an ‘undertaker’, that is, a man who undertook to bring in a specified number of families to work the land—no Gaelic Irish tenants were permitted. Demand was strong, and eventually thirty-five undertakers were successful in getting estates. It was not long, however, before the plantation of Munster began to run into trouble. The principal drawback in implementing the scheme was that not enough ordinary English farming families came over, and those that did were fatally exposed in the turbulent conditions following the outbreak of war between England and Spain.

  Throughout the spring of 1588 the supposedly invincible Armada, 130 vessels in all, massed before Lisbon, took on stores and made ready for the invasion of England. After years of vacillation Philip II of Spain, the most powerful monarch in the world, had embarked finally on war with Elizabeth. The fate of Ireland as well as of England hung in the balance.

  Episode 60

  THE WRECK OF THE ARMADA


  From the time the Armada entered the English Channel, Philip II’s dream of conquering England was turning to dust. Raked by English cannon fire and scattered by fireships, the Spanish fleet could do no other than take flight up the North Sea, around the Shetlands and westwards deep into the Atlantic. In the mountainous seas stirred up by autumn gales some Armada vessels were driven inexorably towards the western shores of Ireland. Eating only ship’s biscuit riddled with weevils and parched by lack of fresh water, the crews were exhausted, ill, and many were dying. Such men posed no threat to English power in Ireland.

  In Dublin Castle Sir William Fitzwilliam, Queen Elizabeth’s Lord Deputy, was starved of news. Had the Spanish invaded England? When a messenger galloped into the courtyard with news of great ships seen all along the west coast, Fitzwilliam’s anxiety became acute. His orders were clear: put to the sword any Spaniard who stepped ashore.

  Twenty-four men survived the wreck of a frigate in Tralee Bay, only to be seized and hanged there by the orders of Lady Denny. Don Juan Martinez de Recalde, Admiral of the Biscay Squadron, Captain General of the Ocean Sea, and second-in-command of the Invincible Armada, anchored inside the Blasket Islands. Now, like so many of his crew, Recalde was dying. All that was left on board his galleon, a spy reported to Fitzwilliam, were ‘25 pipes of wine, and very little bread, and no water, but what they brought out of Spain, which stinketh marvellously; and their flesh meat they cannot eat, their drouth is so great’. Eight men sent ashore at Dunquin had their throats cut. After forcing the terrified islanders at gunpoint to give him water, Recalde sailed away. Close by, the Nuestra Señora de la Rosa tried to anchor in Blasket Sound. Dragged by the tide and split open on a hidden reef, the galleon sank; all 700 on board drowned save for one man. Seven vessels entered the Shannon estuary, flying white flags, but the Sheriff of Clare refused gold and an offer to exchange barrels of wine for casks of water. Don Pedro de Mendoza landed at Clare Island off the Mayo coast, but he and his crew of a hundred men had their treasure seized and were butchered there by the O’Malley chief. On a neighbouring strand at Burrishoole a galleon ran aground on sand. Local people rushed upon them and killed them for their finery.