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

  At Galway harbour Don Luis de Cordoba put men ashore, only to see them taken prisoner. Townspeople tore at them, ripping off their gold chains. The rest of the crew were taken by fishermen; some were so weak that ‘they could not swallow what food they were given, but vomited it straight away’. All were then hanged or shot, with the exception of Don Luis, who was held for ransom.

  On 14 September La Trinidad Valencera sought shelter in the lee of the Inishowen peninsula. Despite being one of the greatest ships of the Armada, the vessel was dangerously overloaded and had been shipping water in the wild south-westerly storm. Limping down the eastern shore, the ship cast anchor and the Commander of the Regiment of Naples, Don Alonso de Luzon, sent a cockboat ashore. As a survivor informed Philip II, ‘They landed with rapiers in their hands whereupon they found four or five savages who bade them welcome and used them well until twenty more wild men came unto them, after which time they took away a bag of money.’ The ‘wild men’ were O’Dohertys of Inishowen, and they did what they could for the stricken Spanish. For two days boats and curraghs plied back and forth with supplies until suddenly La Trinidad Valencera sank; forty men who were below decks were drowned. In the 1980s the Derry Sub-Aqua Club, diving in Kinnagoe Bay, found remains of the wreck, including a massive siege-gun embossed with the name of Philip II in Latin; it now stands at the entrance of the Tower Museum. Don Alonso made up his mind to cross the Foyle and seek the help of the MacDonnells of the Glens. With barely the strength to make the journey, this mixed band of Spaniards, Neapolitans, Greeks and Dalmatians set out with banners flying and drums beating. By nightfall they had travelled only as far as Galliagh, close to Derry, and here they were confronted by Irish soldiers in English pay. After a brisk skirmish Alonso’s exhausted men surrendered on condition that they would be treated as prisoners of war. As soon as they had given up their weapons, however, they were stripped naked and at first light taken into a field. There almost two hundred of them were butchered.

  This massacre notwithstanding, it was in the far north-west, remote from Dublin, that Spanish castaways were to be given vital help by the native Irish.

  Episode 61

  THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE GIRONA

  Don Alonso Martinez de Leiva de Rioja, Knight of Santiago, Commander of Alcuescar, was general-in-chief of the land forces of the Armada entrusted with the conquest of England. By September 1588 his only concern was to survive. Enduring the terror of mountainous waves round Scotland and in the North Atlantic, de Leiva’s ship, Sancta Maria Rata Encoronada, was driven on to the Mayo coast, where it foundered in Blacksod Bay. The survivors transferred to a transport vessel; however, to reach Spain in such an overladen ship was impossible, and so de Leiva set out for neutral Scotland. A strong southwesterly pushed the ship northwards past Erris, across Donegal Bay to skirt the sea-cliffs of Slieve League, only to be driven at night into Loughros More Bay. Here, an Irishman on board recalled, ‘Falling to anchor, there fell a great storm which brake in sunder all their cables and struck them upon ground.’ Although his leg had been broken against the capstan, de Leiva rallied the survivors to entrench themselves on an island in Kiltooris Lough.

  A week later the commander heard that three Spanish vessels had taken shelter in Killybegs harbour. Perhaps a thousand men accompanied de Leiva across the mountain pass to join their compatriots. Here only one Spanish ship remained afloat, the Girona, a three-masted galleas with thirty-six oars pulled by 244 rowers. De Leiva resolved to repair the ship and sail for Scotland. A spy dashed off a message to Dublin Castle:

  The Spaniards are buying workhorses and mares for food. The best of the Spaniards in MacSweeney’s country are going away and will leave the rest to shift for themselves because the ship cannot receive them all.

  About 1,300 Spaniards crowded aboard the Girona at Killybegs, as another spy reported:

  The 26th instant October the said galley departed from the said harbour with as many Spaniards as she could carry.... The Spaniards gave MacSweeney, at their departure, twelve butts of sack wine ... the MacSweeneys and their followers have gotten great store of the Spanish calivers and muskets.

  The Girona negotiated the wild waters off Bloody Foreland and Inishowen, only to have her rudder smashed by a northerly gale which blew the vessel on to the north Antrim coast. Close to the Giant’s Causeway at Lacada Point the ship struck a long basalt reef and split apart. The disaster of that terrible night was so great that the death toll was only two hundred short of the number lost in the Titanic in 1912. In the pitch blackness close to midnight, with a strong tide sweeping away from the reef, only nine men survived.

  Three hundred and eighty years later the Belgian archaeologist Robert Sténuit discovered the wreck and brought Girona’s treasures to the surface. This, the most complete collection of Armada archaeological findings, is a permanent reminder of the flower of the Spanish nobility who died with Don Alonso, and the nameless sailors, conscripts and galley slaves who perished in these cold northern waters.

  A survivor of the Armada, commenting on this loss of life, wrote: ‘The gentlemen were so many that a list of their names would fill a quire of paper.’ That survivor was Captain Francisco de Cuellar. He had been on board one of three ships—the San Juan, the Lavia and the Santa Maria de Vision—forced to take shelter in Sligo Bay, half a league from the shore at Streedagh. After five days at anchor, he recalled,

  There sprang up so great a storm on our beam, with a sea up to the heavens, so that the cables could not hold nor the sails serve us.... We were driven ashore, with all three ships upon a beach with very fine sand, shut in on one side and the other by great rocks. Such a thing was never seen; for within the space of an hour all three ships were broken to pieces, so that there did not escape three hundred men, and more than one thousand were drowned.

  The secretary to the Irish Council reported to London: ‘At my late being in Sligo I numbered in one strand of less than five miles in length above 1,100 dead corpses of men which the sea had driven upon the shore.’

  Most of the survivors were put to the sword or hanged, but Captain Cuellar managed to reach some friendly Irish inland:

  The savages are well affected to us Spaniards, because they realise that we are attacking the heretics and are their great enemies. If it was not for those natives who kept us as if belonging to themselves, not one of our people would have escaped. We owe them a good turn for that, though they were the first to rob us and strip us when were cast on shore.

  Protected by the MacClancys and O’Rourkes in Leitrim, Cuellar survived to describe how those Irish lived.

  Episode 62

  THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN FRANCISCO DE CUELLAR

  In the autumn of 1588 three Spanish Armada ships were smashed to pieces by a storm in Sligo Bay. When Captain Francisco de Cuellar managed to reach the shore by clinging to a door broken off a hatchway, the Irish, stripping castaways of their valuables, left him alone because his clothes were drenched in blood from all his injuries. He joined another young Spaniard. Two armed Irishmen approached them:

  They were sorry to see us [Cuellar later recalled] and cut a quantity of rushes and grass, covered us well, and then betook themselves to the shore to plunder.

  When fast asleep I was disturbed by a great noise of men on horseback who were going to plunder the ships. I turned to call my companion, and found he was dead, which occasioned me great affliction and grief.

  Walking with difficulty, Cuellar reached a monastery:

  I found the church and the images of the saints burned and completely ruined, and twelve Spaniards hanging within the church by the act of the Lutheran English, who went about searching for us to make an end of all of us.

  Limping inland, he entered a wood, when

  An old savage came out from behind the rocks, and two young men with their arms—one English—and a girl of the age of twenty years, most beautiful in the extreme.... The Englishman came up saying, ‘Yield, Spanish poltroon’ ... he cut the sinew of my righ
t leg.

  They stripped him and to their delight found his gold chain worth a thousand dollars. The girl, however, took pity on him:

  The girl lamented very much to see the bad treatment I received, and asked them to leave me the clothes.... Moreover, they had taken away some relics of great value. These the savage damsel took and hung round her neck, making me a sign that she was a Christian: which she was in like manner to Mahomet.

  Cuellar made his way to the mountains, where he met some Irish who gave him a horse and a boy to guide him. His journey, however, was still beset by danger:

  We heard a very great noise, and the boy said to me, by signs, ‘Save yourself, Spain’ (for so they call us); ‘many Sassana are coming this way and they will make bits of you if you do not hide yourself.’ They call the English ‘Sassanas’. God delivered me from them.

  He did not escape another party of men, who left him completely naked. Making a covering for himself with an old mat and bracken, he struggled on. Eventually a priest took him to the chief of the MacClancys of Leitrim:

  The wife of [MacClancy] was very beautiful in the extreme, and showed me much kindness. One day we were sitting in the sun and it came to be suggested that I should examine their hands and tell their fortunes. I began to look at the hands of each, and to say to them a hundred thousand absurdities, which pleased them so much that there was no other Spaniard better than I ...

  Meanwhile Queen Elizabeth’s Lord Deputy, Sir William Fitzwilliam, was on the march. Could Rossclogher Castle, MacClancy’s fortress standing on a crannog in Lough Melvin, hold out against the English?

  This savage [Cuellar’s account continues], taking into consideration the great force that was coming against him, decided to fly to the mountains.... The chief, with dishevelled hair down to his eyes, burning with rage, said he could not remain.... We, the nine Spaniards who were there, decided to say to the savage that we wished to hold the castle and defend it to the death.... The enemy was very indignant at it, and came upon the castle with his forces ... without being able to approach close on account of the water which intervened.

  We had been besieged for seventeen days, when Our Lord saw fit to deliver us from that enemy by great falls of snow, to such an extent that he was compelled to depart with his force.

  The grateful MacClancy chief offered his sister in marriage to Cuellar, but the Spanish captain preferred to make his way northwards into Ulster until he reached the lordship of the O’Cahans, now in the county of Londonderry:

  Some women kept me there for a month and a half in safety, and cured me. In the [village] which was composed of thatched huts, were some very beautiful girls, with whom I was very friendly.

  When the English came to take him away, these girls helped him to escape to the shores of Lough Neagh. There he was introduced to a Catholic bishop who arranged a vessel to take Cuellar and some other Spaniards to Scotland and from there to Spanish Flanders. By October 1589 he had reached Antwerp, where he wrote the letter which contains the narrative of his adventures.

  It is an account which tells us much about how the Irish lived in the late sixteenth century.

  Episode 63

  ‘THE WILD IRISH ARE BARBAROUS AND MOST FILTHY IN THEIR DIET’

  The Spanish Armada castaway, Captain Francisco de Cuellar, lived with the Irish in the far north-west of Ireland for almost a year. Though he was grateful for their kindness to him, he and other Spaniards without hesitation described the Irish as savages:

  The custom of these savages is to live as brute beasts in the mountains, which are very rugged in that part of Ireland where we lost ourselves. They are great walkers, and inured to toil. The men are all large-bodied, and of handsome features and limbs; and as active as the roe-deer. The most of the women are very beautiful, but badly got up. They do not eat oftener than once a day, and this is at night; and that which they usually eat is butter with oaten bread. They drink sour milk, for they have no other drink; they don’t drink water, although it is the best in the world. On feast days they eat some flesh half-cooked without bread or salt, as that is their custom.

  Edmund Campion, an English scholar subsequently executed as a Jesuit traitor, commented on what was on the menu of the Irish:

  Shamrocks, watercresses, roots and other herbs they feed upon, oatmeal and butter they cram together. They drink whey, milk and beef-broth, flesh they devour without bread, corn such as they have they keep for their horses.

  There is no doubt that cattle were at the heart of the Gaelic farming economy and that dairy produce formed the most important part of the diet. Oats had a much better chance of ripening than wheat, particularly in the wetter parts of the north and the west. On one occasion the O’Donnells fell upon Shane O’Neill’s warriors while they were holding out their helmets to be served raw oatmeal with molten butter poured over it. Fresh milk was generally too precious to be drunk in any quantity, but buttermilk was widely consumed. Fynes Moryson, secretary to Lord Deputy Mountjoy, wrote that the people ‘esteem for a great dainty sour curds, vulgarly called Bonaclabbe’. This was bainne clabair, or bonnyclabber: clotted milk. Blood was sometimes drawn from below the ears of living cattle or horses and mixed with butter to form a jelly. Moryson adds that ‘No meat they fancy so much as pork, the fatter the better.’

  By this time wine was imported by the Gaelic lords in exchange for hides or, for example in Tír Conaill, as payment by Spaniards for the right to fish. Malted oats and barley could not only be brewed to make ale, but was now often distilled to make uisce beathadh, whiskey, the ‘water of life’, much favoured by English commanders for medicinal purposes. Sir Josias Bodley found priests in eastern Ulster pouring ‘usquebaugh down their throats by day and by night’.

  As the sixteenth century drew to a close, few Englishmen travelled all parts of Ireland as much as the Lord Deputy’s secretary, Fynes Moryson. It should be remembered that his uncomplimentary accounts were written about the Irish who were constantly on the move as the forces of Queen Elizabeth were closing in on them:

  The wild Irish, inhabiting many and large provinces, are barbarous and most filthy in their diet. They scum the seething pot with an handful of straw, and strain their milk taken from the cow through a like handful of straw, none of the cleanest, and so cleanse, or rather more defile the pot and milk. They devour great morsels of meat unsalted, and they eat commonly swine’s flesh, seldom mutton, and all these pieces of flesh ... they seethe in a hollow tree, lapped in a raw cow’s hide, and so set over the fire, and therewith swallow whole lumps of filthy butter.

  Moryson, like other English observers, mentions the liking the Irish had for shamrock—almost certainly this was wood sorrel (known to some today as ‘Sour Sally’), rightly regarded as a piquant enhancement to a good, fresh salad:

  They willingly eat the herb shamrock, being of a sharp taste, which as they run and are chased to and fro, they snatch like beasts out of the ditches.... They drink milk like nectar, warmed with a stone first cast into the fire, or else beef-broth mingled with milk; but when they come to any market town to sell a cow or a horse, they never return home, till they have drunk the price in Spanish wine (which they call the King of Spain’s Daughter), or in Irish ‘usquebaugh’ till they have out-slept two or three days’ drunkenness. And not only the common sort, but even the lords and their wives, the more they want this drink at home, the more they swallow it when they come to it, till they be as drunk as beggars.

  As more and more of the island fell under their control, the English found much about its people to both attract and repel them.

  Episode 64

  ‘A FIT HOUSE FOR AN OUTLAW, A MEET BED FOR A REBEL, AND AN APT CLOAK FOR A THIEF’

  The Spanish Armada castaway, Captain Francisco de Cuellar, found the Irish men who protected him handsome and fine-limbed, and was constantly encountering Irish girls ‘beautiful in the extreme’. He was not, however, impressed by their dress:

  They clothe themselves, according to their habit, with
tight trousers and short loose coats of very coarse goat’s hair. They cover themselves with blankets, and wear their hair down to their eyes.

  The ‘goat’s hair’ was probably coarse sheep’s wool, and ‘blankets’ were the mantles which were the most distinctive item of Irish dress. The mantle was an enveloping outer woollen cloak. These rectangular garments were worn by everyone in Ireland, young and old, rich and poor. The most popular mantles had a tufted or curled nap raised with the aid of a teasel seed-head. These tufts on the inside of the mantle helped with insulation and were treated with a mixture of honey and vinegar to stop them uncurling. Tightly woven mantles were remarkably waterproof; when they were issued to English soldiers in Ireland in 1600, it was argued that