Why it matters 400 years later
Fintan O'Toole on how the legend became more important than the event
In the nave of the church of San Pietro in Montorio, not far from the Vatican, a black carpet covers much of the floor. Beneath it lie two elaborate marble tombstones, highly wrought with coloured inlay borders, shields, crests and Latin inscriptions extolling the Catholic faith, King Phillip III of Spain and Pope Paul V. The names on the stones are those of Hugh O'Neill, baron of Dungannon, son of the more famous Hugh O'Neill; Rory O'Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnell and heir to Red Hugh O'Donnell; and his brother Cathbharr. All three are recorded as having died of "fever" (probably malaria) in 1608 and 1609, less than two years after they, along with the cream of the Ulster Gaelic aristocracy, sailed from Rathmullan on Lough Swilly in what became known as the Flight of the Earls. Beside their graves is a stone marking the spot where Hugh O'Neill, the great Earl of Tyrone, is thought to be buried.
In this ancient city, so far from the woods and bogs where the Ulster earls inflicted terrifying defeats on the forces of a resurgent, self-confident Tudor England, these memorials mean little. The keepers of the church are not pleased by requests to roll back the carpet that covers them.
The stone that marks Tyrone's resting place is a modern copy, unveiled in 1989, of the original that was lost when the church was damaged in fighting between French forces and those of the Italian revolutionary Garibaldi in 1849. It was probably cut up and used for paving, the fate from which the other two memorials were narrowly rescued by the intervention of an Irish Dominican priest. These weird relics of an obscure, distant history scarcely matter to the Italians, and it is not at all obvious that they should matter to us.
The tragic grandeur of the Flight of the Earls was, after all, an accident of history. Those who left in September 1607 did not see themselves as participating in a moment of epic finality. They intended to return to continue the fight for their own lands and for the Catholic counter-reformation against Protestantism. Young Hugh O'Neill's gravestone records that his death "shattered the hopes of many . . . that he would one day restore the Catholic faith in its full splendour" in Ireland.
Nor were the chieftains who left Ireland in 1607 popular heroes in any simple sense. Much of the minor Gaelic aristocracy saw Hugh O'Neill in particular as a self-aggrandising threat to their own power and was not at all displeased at his departure. Niall Garbh O'Donnell had fought with the English against his dynastic rival, Red Hugh O'Donnell, as did Tyrone's son-in-law Donal O'Cahan.
The redivision of land in Ulster that followed the Flight of the Earls initially favoured some of the minor branches of the O'Neill and Maguire dynasties as well as old Gaelic families like the O'Boyles, MacSweeneys, and O'Hanlons. The feelings of the majority of Irish people, the so-called "churls", are not recorded, but Donegal folklore long recorded an enthusiastic welcome for the Flight. The rebel armies had been largely manned by mercenaries and there was little evidence of popular resistance to the spread of English rule after the defeat of the Gaelic lords in the Nine Years War. Historian Marianne Elliott has even noted that "The 'churls' may well have fared a good deal better under the new dispensation than under the Gaelic land system."
It is not even true that, as is often claimed, the Flight of the Earls marked the death of Gaelic Ireland. There was certainly a profound cultural disruption. The poet Daibhi O Bruadair, born in 1625, referred to his time as that of "briseadh an tseanghnathaimh" - the breaking of the old customs. For his class - the traditional poets and scholars who had enjoyed privilege and patronage under the old Gaelic order - the period after the Flight was disastrous. The schools in which the complex forms and oral traditions of the old bards had been preserved went into sharp decline.
THE KEYNOTES IN Gaelic culture became nostalgia for a lost golden age and dreams of a saviour arriving from abroad to restore it. At first, there was mourning for the lost chiefs, like Eochaidh O hEodhasa's ode to his patron Hugh Maguire, killed in a skirmish near Cork in 1600. Then there were evocations of a land bereft of its true inhabitants, like Aindrias Mac Marcais's The Deserted Land: "Tonight Ireland is lonely . . . There is no laughter at a child's deeds, music ceases, Gaelic is imprisoned . . . No praise poem is recited, no bedtime story told, no desire to see a book, no giving ear to the family pedigrees . . ." Then there were denunciations of the new English masters as a "blind ignorant crew" for their lack of appreciation of the great Gaelic poets. Then there were increasingly dreamy evocations of the Stuarts, the dethroned British royal family who gradually replaced the O'Neills and the Spanish as wished-for saviours from beyond the water.
Yet the cataclysm for the old Gaelic order also produced, paradoxically, a flourishing of Gaelic literature. Where the old bards had passed on their knowledge through oral transmission in closed schools, the break-up of the schools made it necessary to write things down. They had to be written, too, in a language that was more accessible to the ordinary people.
New forms of Gaelic literature emerged. Geoffrey Keating (Seathrun Ceitinn) wrote his Foras Feasa ar Eirinn (A Primer of Knowledge on Ireland) to refute the calumnies on the Irish in previous works by English authors. Micheal O Cleirigh and his three assistants returned from the Catholic seminary at Louvain in the 1620s to collect old manuscripts and compiled the Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland, an indispensable source for early Irish history. Poets began to adopt the song metres of the ordinary people and to write in a more immediate and personal way. This in turn may have given a new stimulus to the Gaelic oral tradition, with a huge body of stories, songs, rhymes and prayers emerging after 1600. Arguably, Gaelic poetry's two great masterpieces, Brian Merriman's The Midnight Court and Eibhlin Dubh Ni Chonaill's Lament for Art O'Leary, date from the late 18th century.
If the Flight of the Earls was not in any simple sense a national tragedy, and if it did not mark the death of Gaelic Ireland, why is it worth remembering ? In part, the answer lies precisely in the way the complex history of the times became a romantic story. The narrative that was forged by Irish priests and writers from their continental exile in the decades after the Flight may have been, as Brian Friel explored in his play Making History, a sanitised tale of saintly Catholics fighting a noble but doomed struggle against Protestant heresy. But it was a great story and the Flight gave it an almost artistic conclusion that enhanced its power. In a culture that would be characterised by emigration, the moment of departure and the deaths in exile resonated with ordinary experience and made complex, haughty men like O'Neill into mythic figures who could embody a defeated nation.
That story helped to shape the self-image of Irish Catholics, especially in Ulster. The Flight, along with the confiscation of Catholic church property, opened the way to the Plantation of Ulster in which Gaelic tribal lands were progressively occupied by English and Scottish landlords and tenants. By 1732, Ulster had become a predominantly Protestant province, with 313,000 Protestants and 192,000 Catholics. A sense of possession and dispossession solidified itself along sectarian lines.
The potency of the story of the Flight of the Earls meant that Catholics, most of whom had in fact never possessed much land in the first place, could identify with the great lords who had been forced into exile and expropriated. Even in 1993, one of Derry's most remarkable Catholic civic leaders, Paddy Doherty, told the Opsahl inquiry into the Troubles that he had just been "watching on TV a programme about the conquest of Northern Ireland and the setting up of the Plantation". It was, he said, "the root problem of the present troubles". Whether true or not, that it was seen to be true is reason enough to reflect on the enduring resonance of the events of the 1590s and 1600s.
Just as importantis the way the story of O'Neill, O'Donnell and their allies raises questions about which the contemporary reverberations could hardly be more potent. We live at a time when talk of a "clash of civilisations", of religious fundamentalism, of a war to the death between civilisation and barbarism is very much in the air. The bloody struggle that culminated in the Flight of the Earls is one of the prototypes of this way of imagining conflict. In a period that was crucial to the emergence of European modernity, Ireland was turned into a battleground for what each side saw as a war to save civilisation. The English characterised the Gaelic Irish as wild, irrational savages. The Irish, sucked ever further into Spain's super-Catholic militancy, came to see themselves as champions of truth against heresy.
In the process, real people like Hugh O'Neill - culturally nimble, able to adapt to different social and political environments, alert to the wider world - were turned into monolithic symbols of either savagery or saintliness. The complex realities that were left behind when the ship left Rathmullan in 1607 for a voyage into romantic myth are, in our more propitious times, worth recalling.
