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

  The Spanish in Kinsale, the English besieging them, and the Irish surrounding the English, all suffered terrible losses from hunger, disease and the wet and the cold. Men on watch dropped dead during the night. The Lord Deputy’s secretary wrote:

  And it was most true, that our men daily died by dozens, so as the sick and runaways considered, we were grown as weak as at our first setting down.

  It was admitted that the English lost some 6,000 men in this way during the siege. The Spanish made a fierce sally from the town and spiked two of the English heavy guns. But the cost in lives was high, and the men were weak from lack of food. The English too made an assault, but failed to breach Kinsale’s walls. Del Águila’s desperate appeal to the Irish to attack without delay was foiled when his message was intercepted by the English. On 23 December O’Neill finally agreed to Red Hugh’s pleadings that the Irish, numbering around 6,000, should launch a full-scale attack on the English lines at dawn on Christmas Eve. The Lord Deputy’ secretary recalled:

  All the night was clear with lightning (as in the former nights were great lightnings with thunder) to the astonishment of many.... This night our horsemen set to watch, to their seeming did see lamps burn at the points of their spears in the midst of these lightning flashes.... Suddenly one of the Lord President’s horsemen called the Lord Deputy at his door, and told him, that Tyrone’s army was come up very near to our camp.

  The horseman had seen the slow-burning fuses of the Irish handguns glowing in the dark. Red Hugh’s army lost its way in the half-light, and Hugh O’Neill, against the advice of the Spanish officers, halted behind boggy ground. Vital time was lost as the three massive Irish armies finally made a coordinated advance. Dawn had come when Mountjoy ordered his captains to charge the Irish with their cavalry. O’Neill saw his great army scattered and slaughtered. Mountjoy’s secretary’s account concludes:

  The Irish not used to fight in plain ground, and something amazed with the blowing up of a gunpowder bag (they having upon the like fright defeated the English at Blackwater), but most discouraged to see their horse fly, being all chiefs and gentlemen, were suddenly routed, and our men followed the execution.

  It was all over before the Spanish realised what had happened, and their sally from the town came too late.

  This was the most terrible defeat the Gaelic Irish had ever suffered in the entire history of their conflict with the English. In less than two years all of Ireland from end to end would be conquered by the English crown for the very first time.

  Episode 76

  THE TREATY OF MELLIFONT

  The Annals of the Four Masters recognised that the victory of Lord Deputy Mountjoy over Hugh O’Neill, Red Hugh O’Donnell and the Spanish at Kinsale on Christmas Eve 1601 was a catastrophe from which Gaelic Ireland would never recover:

  Manifest was the displeasure of God, and misfortune to the Irish of fine Fodhla.... Immense and countless was the loss in that place; for the prowess and valour, prosperity and affluence, nobleness and chivalry, dignity and renown, bravery and protection, devotion and pure religion, of the island, were lost in this engagement.

  Red Hugh sailed for Spain; twice he was given an audience with Philip III, but the king was unwilling to provide further aid to the Irish. The Tír Conaill chief died at Simancas in August 1602, poisoned, it was said, by an English spy. Hugh O’Neill, the Earl of Tyrone, tried to negotiate a compromise peace, but Queen Elizabeth would not hear of it. She instructed her Lord Deputy:

  We do now require you very earnestly to be very wary in taking the submissions of these rebels.... Next we do require you, even whilst the iron is hot, so to strike, as this may not only prove a good summer’s journey, but may deserve the title of that action which is the war’s conclusion. For furtherance whereof we have spared no charge.

  The concluding months of this great rebellion of the northern Gaelic lords were among the most terrible. Docwra, busy rounding up rebels around Ballyshannon, reported that those who

  came into my hands alive ... I caused the soldiers to hew in pieces with their swords.... The axe is now at the root of the tree, and I may well say, the neck of the rebellion as good as utterly broken.

  The Lord Deputy was in the heart of Tyrone, where he took the opportunity to smash the ancient inauguration chair of the O’Neills as well as to destroy the harvest. A terrible man-made famine now began to sweep across Ulster, as Mountjoy’s secretary, Fynes Moryson, recorded:

  Now because I have often made mention formerly of our destroying the rebels’ corn, and using all means to famish them, let me by two or three examples show the miserable estate to which the rebels were thereby brought. Sir Arthur Chichester and the other commanders saw a most horrible spectacle of three children (whereof the eldest was not above ten years old), all eating and gnawing with their teeth the entrails of their mother, upon whose flesh they had fed twenty days past, and having eaten all from the feet upward to the bare bones, roasting it continually by a slow fire, were now coming to the eating of her said entrails in like sort roasted, yet not divided from the body, being as yet raw....

  No spectacle was more frequent in the ditches of towns, and especially in wasted countries, than to see multitudes of these poor people dead with their mouths all coloured green by eating nettles, docks, and all things they could rend above ground.

  Queen Elizabeth at last relented and instructed her Lord Deputy to offer a pardon. The Earl of Tyrone, who had been desperately fighting a rearguard action in the forests of Glenconkeyne, eagerly accepted the offer of a safe-conduct. This was brought to him by his old friend Sir Garret Moore, who took him to his estate of Mellifont Abbey in March 1603 to meet Lord Mountjoy face to face. O’Neill was astonished at the lenient terms offered to him. What was the explanation? The answer was that Mountjoy knew what the earl did not know: that the old queen had died just a few days previously. James VI of Scotland was now James I of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. No one, particularly Mountjoy, knew what his policy would be.

  Provided he renounced the title of The O’Neill and handed the church lands of Ulster to the crown, the earl was allowed to retain his lordship over most of his traditional territory. On 2 June 1603 Hugh O’Neill and the newly elected Lord of Tír Conaill, Rory O’Donnell, left Ireland in the company of Lord Deputy Mountjoy. After narrowly avoiding shipwreck, they arrived in England, where the Gaelic lords were pelted with stones and mud by women who had lost their menfolk in the Irish wars. They were well received by King James I, and O’Donnell was created the Earl of Tyrconnell. This generous pardon infuriated those English officers who had risked their lives campaigning in Ireland. One of them wrote angrily:

  I have lived ... to see that damnable rebel Tyrone brought to England, honoured and well liked.... How I did labour after that knave’s destruction! I adventured perils by sea and land, was near starving, ate horse flesh in Munster, and all to quell that man, who now smileth in peace at those who did hazard their lives to destroy him: and now doth dare us old commanders with his presence and protection.

  However, he and other men who had served the crown were soon to have the satisfaction of seeing these proud Gaelic lords lose all that they had.

  Episode 77

  ‘REMEMBER, REMEMBER, THE FIFTH OF NOVEMBER’

  We must now turn our attention to the ‘Old English’. Who were they? These were descendants of Norman colonists, and of the people they brought over the Irish Sea with them. They lived mostly in Dublin and the area surrounding it known as ‘the Pale’, in towns, and in the fertile plains of Leinster. Though nearly all of them were able to speak Irish fluently, at the beginning of the seventeenth century they were proud to call themselves English—specifically ‘Old’ English to distinguish themselves from the ‘New’ English who had arrived in the sixteenth century. The Old English were loyal to the crown, and many of them had fought in the Lord Deputy’s armies. But they were also Catholics and were loyal to the pope.

  The Old English had high hopes that
the new king, James I, would grant them toleration. Queen Elizabeth had stipulated that all inhabitants of Ireland should attend Protestant churches and recognise her as the supreme governor of the church. In fact her government in Ireland had been far too busy crushing the rebellion led by the Earl of Tyrone to enforce these laws.

  What would King James do, now that peace had returned to Ireland? To their horror, the Old English found that the king was determined to make them Protestants. Sir Arthur Chichester, appointed Lord Deputy in 1605, launched a programme of religious persecution on a scale never before witnessed in Ireland. One official informed the king that the country swarmed with

  priests, Jesuits, seminaries, friars, and Romish bishops; if there be not speedy means to free this kingdom of this wicked rabble, much mischief will burst forth in a very short time.... It is high time they were banished.

  King James issued a proclamation on 4 July 1605, declaring that he would fight to his knees in blood rather than grant toleration. He would never

  give liberty of conscience ... to his subjects in that kingdom ... [or] confirm the hopes of any creature that they should ever have from him any toleration to exercise any other religion than that which is agreeable to God’s Word.

  Now rigidly enforced was an earlier law which fined ordinary Catholics a shilling for every Sunday they failed to attend a Protestant church. (A working man’s wage in those days was five shillings a week.) Letters were delivered to sixteen leading Catholic gentlemen in Dublin fining them £100 each. Catholic clergy were ordered out of the country:

  All priests whatsoever made and ordained by any authority derived or pretended to be derived from the see of Rome shall, before the tenth day of December, depart out of the kingdom of Ireland.

  It proved difficult to enforce these laws in the more remote and more Gaelic parts of the island. And so it was the Old English, especially in Dublin, who suffered most. The leading Catholic noblemen and gentry of the Pale sent a petition to Lord Deputy Chichester to protest against this persecution. But in that very month, on 5 November 1605, the Gunpowder Plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament had been discovered. This was no time for Catholics in either England or Ireland to be demanding the redress of grievances.

  The petitioners were put under house arrest. Sir Patrick Barnewall and other Catholic leaders were cast into the dungeons of Dublin Castle. Chichester personally led the campaign to force Catholics to attend Protestant services. One Catholic gentleman went as far as the church door and then would go no further, whereupon, according to Henry Fitzsimon, Chichester

  told him savagely to go in, and seeing he could not prevail on him, struck him a cruel blow on the head with his stick. Then the mace-bearer attacked him so savagely that he fell to the ground like a dead man, and the Lord Deputy had him dragged into church, where he lay insensible and gasping all the time of the sermon, and no one dared to approach him. Some of his friends afterwards took him home, where he gave his blessed soul to God in two hours.

  Unpaid fines were forcibly collected:

  No doors, no enclosures, no wall can stop them in their course; they are unmoved by the shrieks of the females and by the weeping of the children. Everything is torn open, and whatever is of any value is set aside to be taken away, whatever is worthless is thrown in the streets, and devoted to the flames ...

  Meanwhile a similar reign of terror raged in Galway and in the towns of Munster, as a priest reported:

  They rush in crowds into the houses of these servants of God, break open doors, tear off locks, ransack shops, leave no corner unsearched, and carry off everything they can lay their hands on, besides taking the owners prisoners.

  Hearing that their leader, Sir Patrick Barnewall, had been incarcerated in the Tower of London, some Catholic Old English began to plan an uprising. The man who was doing most to encourage them was none other than the Earl of Tyrone. His plotting was to lead directly to what has been long remembered as the ‘Flight of the Earls’.

  Episode 78

  ‘I KNOW THAT THEY WISH TO KILL HIM BY POISON OR BY ANY POSSIBLE MEANS’

  After nine years of revolt against the English crown the Gaelic lords could count themselves lucky to have survived. They still had their titles and their lands.

  All was not well, however. English officers who had done so much to conquer the whole island of Ireland were infuriated by these generous pardons. They felt they should have been rewarded with lands confiscated from traitors. Officials appointed to serve in Ireland by King James set out to undermine the Earl of Tyrone and the other Gaelic lords. One of these was Sir Arthur Chichester, the former governor of Carrickfergus who had been appointed the king’s Lord Deputy in Ireland in 1605. A former Lord Deputy had noticed what he described as Chichester’s ‘greedy gathering’ of lands and property. Another official was Sir John Davies, appointed Solicitor-General for Ireland in 1603. He wanted to impose English law on

  the Irishry in the province of Ulster ... the most rude and unreformed part of Ireland, and the seat and nest of the last great rebellion, [so] that the next generation will in tongue and heart and every way else become English; so as there will be no difference or distinction, but the Irish Sea betwixt us.

  Together Chichester and Davies whittled away at O’Neill’s authority, so that, Chichester reported, ‘now the law of England, and the Ministers thereof, were shackles and handlocks unto him, and the garrisons planted in his country were as pricks in his side’.

  Meanwhile the Earl of Tyrconnell’s position was becoming desperate. A commission appointed in 1605 ‘for division and bounding of the lords’ and gentlemen’s livings’ had ruled that the O’Boyles, MacSweeneys and others did not have to pay rent to the earl. Other fertile lands had been occupied by the newly appointed bishop of the three dioceses of Derry, Raphoe and Clogher, George Montgomery. His wife Susan wrote to her brother in May 1605:

  My Lord Bishop will be at home before Wednesday night. The king hath bestowed on him three Irish bishoprics; the names of them I cannot remember, they are so strange, except one, which is Derry: I pray God it will make us all merry.

  A year later she wrote:

  We are settled in the Derry, in a very pretty little house builded after the English fashion.... I think that Mr Montgomery hath many thousand acres of as good land as any in England; if it were peopled, it were worth many hundreds of pounds by the years.

  Much of this land had been the Earl of Tyrconnell’s; now he was left only with poor mountainous land, and it was noticed that he was ‘very meanly followed’.

  The same Bishop Montgomery also laid claim to large parts of the Earl of Tyrone’s territory. This led the earl to write in complaint to the king in May 1607:

  Whereas it pleased Your Highness of your great bounty to restore me to such lands as I and my ancestors had and enjoyed ... but now, most gracious Sovereign, there are so many that seek to despoil me of the greatest part of the residue which Your Majesty was pleased I should hold ... for the Lord Bishop of Derry, not contented with the great living Your Majesty has been pleased to bestow on him, seeketh to have a great part of my lands, whereunto none of his predecessors ever made claim.

  Bishop Montgomery also encouraged Donal O’Cahan, whose lordship extended over lands which now make up much of Co. Londonderry, to set aside his wife, who was O’Neill’s daughter, and also to deny the Earl of Tyrone’s traditional overlordship in his territory and to refuse to pay him any rent. The dispute became so bitter that King James summoned them both to London.

  It is quite clear that, once in London, Tyrone became convinced that his life was in danger. Certainly the Spanish ambassador at King James’s court thought so too, stating that ‘I know that they wish to kill him by poison or by any possible means ... their fear of him gnaws at their entrails.’

  In the early summer of 1607 the government in London was told by Sir Christopher St Lawrence (subsequently Lord Howth) that a plot was being prepared in Ireland by a league of gentlemen opposed to the cro
wn. There was, he reported,

  a general revolt intended by many of the nobility and principal persons of this land, together with the cities and towns of the greatest strength; and that they will shake off the yoke of the English government, as they term it, and adhere to the Spaniard.

  We now know that the leader of this conspiracy was none other than Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone. Did King James know that Tyrone was in this plot? Actually the king did not know, but O’Neill could not be sure.

  News that the plot had been uncovered settled the matter for the two earls: they would take flight from Ireland and make for Spain. Indeed, the ship to take them there was already on the high seas.

  Episode 79

  THE FLIGHT OF THE EARLS

  Cúchonnacht Maguire, Lord of Fermanagh, had had enough humiliation at the hands of the English. A royal commission appointed in 1605 had taken away half of his ancestral lands. He was certain he and other Gaelic lords would be beggared by the crown. The only answer was to get the help of the King of Spain to drive the English out and restore the Catholic religion.