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

  Gráinne’s reign as the most powerful woman in the west did not end when her husband died in 1582. She certainly needed her wits about her, however, if she was to survive the inexorable extension of English royal power in the province. In 1584 Sir Richard Bingham became Lord President of Connacht. A merciless soldier and an able governor, Bingham crushed all opposition, and, one by one, the great lords of the province submitted.

  In 1585 the Lord President unveiled his ambitious scheme to impose an ordered regime upon the province he governed. This he called the ‘Composition of Connacht’. The lords of the province were no longer to live by billeting their warriors on the lands of their tenants and by the seizing of butter, corn and cattle as tribute. Henceforth the employment of mercenary soldiers was forbidden. Tenant farmers would hereafter pay money rents to these lords, who in turn would pay taxes to the English crown and abide by English laws. In short, these great landowners were no longer allowed to be independent warlords.

  The Composition of Connacht worked quite well in southern Connacht, but it was a different matter in the northern part of the province. Here Gráinne O’Malley was among those who refused to be reconciled to the new regime. Bingham decided he had no choice but to deal in person with this proud woman. After hanging in public seventy men from leading Connacht families for failure to pay rent, Bingham advanced northwards from Galway in February 1586. But with the help of her son-in-law, Richard Burke of Achill, known as the ‘Devil’s Hook’, Gráinne successfully defended her fortress on an island on Lough Mask, called Hag’s Castle. White-capped waves stirred up by a storm foiled Bingham’s attack by boats.

  Eventually she was brought to heel and she travelled to Dublin in 1588 to seek and obtain a pardon from the Lord Deputy. But this restless woman could not be long at peace. Her name persistently crops up in reports sent by Bingham to London. In April 1590, for example,

  Grana O’Malley, with two or three baggage boats full of knaves committed some spoil in the Island of Arran.... Richard Burk, the Devil’s Hook, hath Grana O’Malley in hand till she restore the spoils and repair the harms.

  In other words, the Devil’s Hook acted as a guarantor of Gráinne’s future good behaviour. Foolish man. Her continued piracy caused Bingham to write to the queen’s secretary ‘to gyve your honour Knowledge of her naughty disposicion towards the state’. In another letter Bingham condemned her as ‘a notable traitoress and nurse to all the rebellions in the Province for forty years’.

  In 1593 Gráinne decided to counter Bingham’s criticisms and appeal to Elizabeth herself. She wrote to the queen in the third person, humbly beseeching

  Her Majesty of your princely bounty and liberality to grant her some maintenance for the little time she has to live ... and to grant unto your said subject under your most gracious hand of signet, free liberty during her life to invade with sword and fire all your highness’ enemies.

  The queen summoned her to London, and, despite her age, Gráinne captained one of her galleys and sailed to meet her. These O’Malley vessels were the most substantial ever to have been built by the native Irish: each one was capable of taking up to 300 crew and was propelled by sails and thirty oars, each oar being manned by more than one rower. Gráinne steered out of Clew Bay, dotted with islands, with her castles of Westport, Rockfleet, Burrishoole, Murrisk and Clare Island in view, out into the Atlantic, past Inishturk, Inishark and Inishbofin—where she had another castle—south beyond Connemara and the Aran Islands, and on round the Blaskets and the wild headlands of Kerry. Then she directed her ship beyond Cape Clear and across St George’s Channel eastwards to England, past the Scilly Isles and Penzance, down the English Channel and into the Thames estuary.

  There is no detailed record of the meeting at Greenwich between the pirate queen and Queen Elizabeth. Clearly she got much of what she wanted, for afterwards Elizabeth informed Bingham:

  Grany ne Maly hath made humble suit to us.... We are content, so as the old woman may understand we yield thereof so she is hereof informed and departeth with great thankfulness.... And further, for the pity to be had of this aged woman ... we require [you] to deal with her sons in our name to yield to her some maintenance for her living the rest of her old years.... And this we do write in her favour as she showeth herself dutiful, although she hath in former times lived out of order.... She hath confessed the same with assured promises by oath ... that she will fight in our quarrel with all the world.

  Bingham, for his part, very much doubted that Gráinne would behave herself in future, and he was right. She was to join forces with the Gaelic lords of Ulster and made her fleet of galleys available to them in the Nine Years War, a great rebellion which was to convulse Ireland from end to end. That rebellion, which was to last until 1603, the year when both Gráinne and Elizabeth died, began as the island castle of Enniskillen in Co. Fermanagh came under siege during the winter of 1593–4.

  Episode 69

  THE NINE YEARS WAR BEGINS

  When Hugh Roe MacMahon, the principal Gaelic lord of Monaghan, made war on rival members of his family and raided cattle in the barony of Farney, the property of the Earl of Essex, Lord Deputy Sir William Fitzwilliam decided to teach him a lesson. In 1590 he led an expedition north from Dublin, captured Hugh Roe and hanged him. This severe punishment was followed by a partition of the extensive MacMahon lands. These estates were apportioned to five leading MacMahons and to the heads of some other prominent families in the area.

  The English officials in Dublin Castle were delighted with the results of this experiment. Not one of the new owners of these modest Co. Monaghan estates would be strong enough to threaten rebellion—indeed, each was happy to pay taxes to the crown in return for a secure title to farms which they could pass on by English law to an eldest son. The Master of the Ordnance concluded that this sort of division was ‘the soundest and surest way to bring Ireland to due obedience’.

  Described as a ‘native plantation’, this exercise in social engineering, this application of the principle of ‘divide and rule’, was surely more effective than repeated expensive military expeditions. A similar scheme was drawn up for the neighbouring O’Reilly lordship of East Bréifne, now renamed as Co. Cavan. West Bréifne, which became Co. Leitrim, was another plum ripe for the picking—particularly after its lord, Sir Brian O’Rourke, had been hanged, drawn and quartered as a traitor at Tyburn. One official described the planned ‘native plantation’ of Leitrim as ‘indeed pleasing to God, highly profitable to the queen, and the precedent of it a light and candle to their neighbours of the north to find out speedily the way to wealth, civility and obedience’. Sir Henry Bagenal, the queen’s marshal, who had extensive estates around Newry, agreed with this view. Now he sought the break-up of the great Gaelic lordships of Ulster: ‘The chiefest, or rather the only means to reduce these barbarous people to obedience is to disunite them as all may be enforced to depend on the queen’.

  Not surprisingly, Hugh O’Neill, the Earl of Tyrone, viewed these developments with mounting alarm. Given a good English education in the Pale near Dublin, he had been expected to promote the interests of the crown in the heart of Ulster. The earl, however, proved rather more independent and wilful than expected. For example, he took the law into his own hands by crushing the forces of the seven sons of the legendary Shane O’Neill, and in 1590 he executed one of them—Hugh Gavelach MacShane—pulling on the hangman’s rope himself. To fend off criticism and to delay plans to subdivide Tyrone, the earl paid regular bribes to Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam, who was rumoured ‘to fill his own bags daily and hourly’ with the sixteenth-century equivalent of brown-paper envelopes.

  Then the government decided to break up the lands of the Maguires in Co. Fermanagh. When a sheriff arrived, accompanied by troops, this was too much for the Lord of Fermanagh, Hugh Maguire, who rose in rebellion. As one of the principal nobles of Ireland, the Earl of Tyrone was expected to campaign with the queen’s marshal when he was in Ulster. O’Neill had a good record in this re
spect, and now in 1593 he rode alongside Marshal Bagenal. When they reached Fermanagh, they faced not only the Maguires but also the newly elected Lord of Tír Conaill, Red Hugh O’Donnell. Yet only the year before Hugh O’Neill had organised the dramatic escape of Red Hugh from imprisonment in Dublin Castle. To which side did the earl really belong?

  Hugh Maguire made a desperate last stand in his island castle of Enniskillen. As the crown forces pounded the walls with cannon Captain Dowdall launched a large boat on the lough, put a hundred men into it, using hides stretched over curved branches to protect them from missiles hurled on to the deck by hides. The helmsman steered the boat under the castle’s barbican, and the attackers made a breech with pickaxes. The Maguires quickly surrendered. Now it was the English who occupied the castle.

  Soon, however, it would be the English garrison which would be in danger. This was because Hugh O’Neill, the Earl of Tyrone, had joined Red Hugh O’Donnell and Hugh Maguire in rebellion against the queen. On 7 August 1594 a relief force bringing food supplies and munitions to Enniskillen was ambushed fording the River Arney—as the Annals of the Four Masters record, ‘The name of the ford at which this great victory was gained was changed to the Ford of the Biscuits, from the number of biscuits and small cakes left there to the victors on that day.’

  The great rebellion, led by the Gaelic lords of Ulster and known later as the Nine Years War, had begun. In February 1595 O’Neill joined O’Donnell and Maguire to destroy Blackwater Fort near Benburb. Then, on 13 June, Marshal Bagenal, after bringing supplies to Monaghan Fort, was overwhelmed at Clontibret. Sir Edward York, in command of the cavalry, ruefully observed that the Earl of Tyrone commanded a highly professional force, admitting ‘that in no place whatsoever he had served in all his life he never saw more readier or perfecter shot’. Clontibret demonstrated that English garrisons placed in hostile territory were highly vulnerable; yet Elizabeth’s government could see no other way of taming the Ulster lords than by maintaining fortified posts in their territories. Using such tactics and facing such adversaries, the English were to endure many more humiliating reverses before this spreading rebellion could be quelled.

  Episode 70

  ‘FREEING THE COUNTRY FROM THE ROD OF TYRANNICAL EVIL’

  By 1595 it was estimated that Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, commanded no fewer than one thousand horsemen, one thousand pikemen and four thousand foot-soldiers shouldering modern firearms. He had brought together the squabbling ruling families of Gaelic Ulster under his command, had proved himself a skilled tactician in battle, and was now leading his people in the most dangerous Irish rebellion Queen Elizabeth had ever faced in the course of her long reign.

  Elizabeth’s forces lost control of nearly all of Ulster. Now Red Hugh O’Donnell of Tír Conaill, the earl’s most loyal ally, carried the revolt successfully into Connacht. The English lost Sligo Castle, and Sir Richard Bingham, the Lord President of Connacht, failed in his attempt to retake it in July 1595. Tearing down lattice work from the neighbouring abbey, Bingham made a great siege-engine equipped with wheels and covered in hides. But as his men hiding under it tried to undermine the castle stonework, the Irish defenders smashed it with rocks, causing the attackers to flee.

  Meanwhile the Lord Deputy formally proclaimed O’Neill a traitor in Newry. When his army approached Dungannon, O’Neill, realising his castle could not withstand the heavy cannon his spies had seen, demolished it ‘in so great haste [that one night it was] stately and high in the sight of all our army, the next day by noon it was so low that it could scarcely be discerned.’

  Having suffered so many reverses, the English had no choice but to agree to a truce. Immediately after the death of Mabel Bagenal—the earl’s third wife and sister of the queen’s marshal—Hugh O’Neill had married Catherine Magennis, daughter of the Lord of Iveagh. He spent a pleasant honeymoon with the young lady, who was less than half his age, fishing together for salmon on the River Bann at Castleroe. Then a messenger arrived. A Spanish ship had put in at Killybegs with munitions from King Philip II and relics from the pope. Its captain, Don Alonso Cobos, refused to speak to anyone but O’Neill and O’Donnell. He walked forty miles to meet these Irish lords secretly at Lifford in north Donegal. There, in spite of the truce, O’Neill and O’Donnell signed and sealed a letter to the Prince of the Asturias, son of the King of Spain, appealing for his help:

  We have already written, most Serene Prince, to the Great King your father, what we thought most necessary for our country. We implore that Your Highness will aid in his clemency this most excellent and just cause, that of asserting Catholic liberty and of freeing the country from the rod of tyrannical evil, and that, with the help of the Divine Majesty, he may win for Christ an infinite number of souls, snatching them from the jaws of hell, and may wholly destroy the ministers of satanic fury.

  At Lifford, May 16th, 1596.

  This letter, impressed by Hugh O’Neill with his seal of the Red Hand of Ulster, was an indication that the rebellion of the Gaelic lords of the north was no longer just an irritating distraction for the government of Queen Elizabeth. Ireland was being drawn into the titanic and deadly struggle between the Protestant and Catholic powers of Europe. Philip II, the ruler of the greatest empire in the world and the principal champion of the Catholic cause, was eager to help O’Neill and O’Donnell fight the English heretics. His officers advised him on suitable places to bring a Spanish army ashore, including Limerick, Sligo, Carlingford, Teelin and Killybegs. Again and again, however, things went wrong for King Philip.

  In June 1596 the English and Dutch fleets joined together to wreak havoc on Spain’s most important naval port, Cadiz. They burned the city and captured or destroyed fifty-seven ships. It was not until October that eighty-one vessels left Lisbon bound for Donegal. Here Red Hugh O’Donnell stockpiled oats and butter to feed the Spanish when they landed. Nineteen more galleons from Seville joined this fleet, and more vessels from El Ferrol were sailing to meet this great invasion armada when it was overwhelmed by a terrible storm. More than two thousand men perished in the ocean, and at least thirty-two ships were lost.

  In the following year, 1597, Philip tried again to send help to the Irish. Another armada sailed out, made up of no fewer than 136 vessels carrying nearly 13,000 men. Once again the invasion fleet was scattered and overwhelmed by Atlantic gales. Now almost bankrupt, the King of Spain could not summon enough strength for a third attempt. Philip was so depressed that he shut himself away in his remote palace and refused to speak to anyone.

  Yet now was the very time to aid the Gaelic lords. Reports from Ireland in 1598 brought news of a dazzling victory in Ulster—the Battle of the Yellow Ford.

  Episode 71

  ‘THE SCURVY FORT OF BLACKWATER’

  In 1597 the newly appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland, Thomas Lord Burgh, wrote to Queen Elizabeth to assure her that he would not spare himself to bring about the defeat of Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone:

  I will encamp by him, force him, follow; omit no opportunity by night or day.... I will, God willing, stick to him and if need be lie on the ground and drink water ten weeks.

  He launched a two-pronged attack on Ulster. From the west the governor of Connacht marched his troops as far as Belleek, only to be driven back over the River Erne at Ballyshannon, many of his men being swept to their deaths over falls where the hydroelectric dam now stands. The governor’s force was saved from annihilation by the Irish only by a heavy downpour which extinguished the slow-burning matches or fuses used in those days to fire handguns.

  Meanwhile the Lord Deputy blundered deep into Tyrone, where he built a new Blackwater Fort near Benburb to replace the one the Irish had destroyed a couple of years before. He was delighted with his work: ‘It is my first child ... an eyesore in the heart of O’Neill’s country.’ Then, while on campaign in Ulster, the Lord Deputy fell victim to fever; he was carried on a litter to Newry, where he died in October 1597. Burgh’s ‘eyesore in O’Neill’s country’ so
on became a serious headache for the English—how could the Blackwater garrison in the middle of hostile Tyrone be supplied? The plan was to take food and munitions from Belfast Lough to Antrim and from there across Lough Neagh to the River Blackwater. Shane MacBrian, a lord of Clandeboye, interfered with that scheme somewhat by hanging and disembowelling the members of the English garrison placed in Belfast Castle. Then the governor of Carrickfergus Castle, Sir John Chichester, foolishly fell out with the MacDonnells of the Glens. During a parley outside the castle he ordered an attack and was shot through the head, 180 of his men being killed with him. At a single stroke all English gains in eastern Ulster were lost. The previously neutral MacDonnells now became formidable allies of Hugh O’Neill—and the isolation of Blackwater Fort was complete.

  The queen’s experienced commander-in-chief firmly believed that Blackwater Fort should be pulled down and its garrison brought back to safety. He wrote to the queen’s secretary:

  I protest to God the scurvy fort of Blackwater which cannot long be held, doth more touch my heart than all the spoils that ever were made by traitors on mine own lands. The fort was always falling, and never victualled but once (by myself) without an army.

  His advice was ignored. The position of the garrison of 150 men in the heart of Ulster was becoming intolerable: desperate sallies had to be made from the walls to bring in wood and water; and the soldiers were reduced to eating grass on the ramparts.