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Treason rumours precede flight

PLOTTING WITH SPAIN:

A still from the BBC NI documentary TV series, Flight of the Earls/Imeacht na nIarlaí, first broadcast last January. It will be retransmiitted next September to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the Flight.

We now know that the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell were indeed engaged in treason against the Crown. Terms of peace had been agreed between James I and Philip III in London in August 1604. The treaty signed in London included a stipulation that neither of the monarchs would give any help to the rebellious subjects of the other. Neither ruler adhered strictly to that stipulation. At the end of that same year, before Chichester's appointment as Lord Deputy, the Earls had entered into negotiations with King Philip for a substantial Spanish annuity in return for promoting his cause in Ireland. O'Donnell travelled to London and, in the dead of night, met the Spanish ambassador. The deal was only completed early in 1607 when the Spanish authorities released a first payment of 4,000 ducats. It is likely, but impossible to prove, that Tyrone had connections with the Gunpowder Plot - he was in the Pale when it was uncovered.

The Lord Deputy made a viceregal progress [ visit] in Ulster during the summer of 1606. Chichester's principal purpose was to question the property rights of Gaelic freeholders in Monaghan, Cavan and Fermanagh - and to keep a close eye on the Earls. During this time Chichester received information that Cúchonnacht Maguire, a major landholder in Fermanagh, and the Earl of Tyrconnell were planning to flee Ireland without leave. Cúchonnacht was placed under temporary arrest and Tyrconnell, made aware that the Lord Deputy had been forewarned, felt he had no choice but to stay.

Chichester certainly made no attempt to make life more comfortable for Tyrconnell. He refused to punish an army captain convicted of raping an 11-year-old girl on Tyrconnell's property while her limbs were held down by two soldiers. Tyrconnell had, as a mark of goodwill, sent the Lord Deputy a cast of hawks every year. Chichester now seized Tyrconnell's remained three casts, the Earl declaring to the Lord Deputy that he "found himself more grieved at their loss in that nature than all the injuries he had before received".

Meanwhile, Davies was making assiduous attempts to question Cúchonnacht's legal title to his lands in Fermanagh. The Attorney General seemed to relish the fact that he was loathed by so many of those who had dealings with him.

Actually, the most contemptuous description of him was by a fellow Englishman who remarked on how the corpulent Davies "goes waddling with his arse out behind him as though he were about to make everyone that he meets a wall to piss against . . . he never walks but carries a cloakbag behind him, his arse sticks out so far".

Cúchonnacht Maguire could take no more humiliation. He succeeded in getting out of Ireland unnoticed by the Crown authorities and by June 1607 he was in Spanish Flanders.

A DOUBLE AGENT

Around 30 years before, Gráinne O'Malley, the legendary "Pirate Queen of Connacht", had put in at Howth to obtain water and provisions after a long voyage. Furious that Lord Howth kept his castle closed and refused her hospitality, Gráinne had seized his little grandson on the beach and taken him back to Mayo. When Lord Howth travelled west to find his grandson, Gráinne refused a ransom but handed over the boy on the promise that the gates of Howth Castle would never be closed and that an extra place would always be set at his table for anyone seeking hospitality.

The little boy, Christopher St Lawrence, grew up to be a dashing - if somewhat unhinged - soldier who served the Crown bravely in the Lord Deputy's armies. He had, however, been involved in the Earl of Essex's conspiracy in 1601, and had been fortunate, unlike the Earl, not to lose his head. This Old English lord of the Pale seems to have spent the rest of his career as a double agent, acting both for the King of Spain and the Lord Deputy. He had spent several months in Spanish Flanders and was on good terms with Henry O'Neill, the Earl of Tyrone's son who had become a colonel in the Spanish army. An English spy reported that the two were "very familiar and inward friends and were oftentimes bedfellows".

St Lawrence was back in Flanders early in 1607 where he had talks with Fr Florence Conry, who had come from Madrid with a grant of 300 crowns from Philip III. In July, St Lawrence was in London where he sought an urgent meeting with James I's Secretary of State, Sir Robert Cecil, the Earl of Salisbury. There he told the king's minister that there was a conspiracy in Ireland, "a general revolt intended by many of the nobility and principal persons of this land . . . and that they will shake off the yoke of the English government, as they term it, and adhere to the Spaniard".

St Lawrence then travelled to Dublin to repeat his accusations to Chichester, naming the Earl of Tyrconnell and Richard Nugent, Baron of Delvin, as leaders. He added that, while he lacked direct evidence, he was certain that the Earl of Tyrone "is as deep in the treason as any". The Lord Deputy's problem was that St Lawrence flatly refused, even at the peril of his life, to give testimony in court. Salisbury and Chichester decided to keep these revelations to themselves for the time being.

Until now, King James had been extremely cordial in his correspondence with the Earl of Tyrone. Rather suddenly, in the summer of 1607, the king's tone changed - clearly, he was reacting to St Lawrence's report passed on to him by his Secretary of State. Tyrone and O'Cahan received peremptory orders to appear in London by September to have their dispute resolved in court.

Normally a man not easily rattled, O'Neill was now in a state of acute anxiety. Chichester wrote later that "it is observed here by some that knew him best , that since he received His Majesty's letter for his repair thither, he did lose his former cheerfulness and grew often exceeding pensive". The prospects of the case against O'Cahan going his way were rapidly ebbing away. Bishop Montgomery had stepped in to tell O'Cahan to set aside Tyrone's daughter and "by order of law" to take back his first wife. At a preliminary hearing in May, 1607, in Dublin Tyrone lost his composure "snatching a paper out of O'Cahan's hand, and rending it" in front of Chichester. He was beginning to fear that, once in London, his life would be in peril.

Later Tyrone and Tyrconnell wrote that "the King of England summoned us to London with the intention of either beheading us, or putting us in the Tower of London for life". Certainly the Spanish ambassador thought so, observing soon after the Flight: "I know that they wish to kill him by poison or by any possible means . . . their fear of him gnaws at their entrails."

Had King James been informed of his treasonable dealings with the Spanish court? It seems that the incorrigible St Lawrence had called to warn Tyrone that James had been told of his conspiratorial communications with Spain. Still, the Earl of Tyrone had no immediate plans to flee from Ireland . . . not, that is, until he was given a message that a certain ship had sailed into Lough Swilly.

LOUGH SWILLY

Cúchonnacht Maguire masterminded the Flight of the Earls. Described by the Annals of the Four Masters as a "rapid-marching adventurous man, endowed with wisdom and beauty of person", he was such a master of disguise that it was said his nearest friends would have found it hard to identify him. Provided with silver and gold by the Spanish king, Maguire took great care to obtain a ship which would not immediately arouse suspicion. He leased an 80-ton vessel in France, armed with 16 cannon and manned by 60 heavily disguised soldiers. Maguire set sail in great secrecy from Nantes and made for Ulster. Near to its destination the ship was arrested by a Scottish warship and held for two days. Fortunately Maguire had put nets and salt aboard and he convinced his captors that he had come to Ulster only to fish.

On September 4th, 1607, the vessel sailed into Lough Swilly and anchored off Rathmullan. At nightfall a man came ashore with Spanish ducats and set out to bring the news to the Earl of Tyrconnell of the ship's arrival. Two days later a messenger reached the Earl of Tyrone who was staying with Sir Garret Moore, foster-father to his son John, at Mellifont. Chichester, who had just had a meeting with Tyrone nearby at Slane, observed afterwards:

"The manner of his departure, carrying his little son with him who was brought up in Sir Garret's house, made me suspect he had mischief in his head; harm I knew he could do none, if they were upon their keeping, for he was altogether without arms and munition; and his flight beyond the seas I should never have suspected . . ." Sir Garret himself reported that Tyrone "wept abundantly when he took his leave, giving solemn farewell to every child and every servant in the house, which made them all marvel, because it was not his manner to use such compliments".

The earl made his way from Mellifont to Dundalk and from there to Armagh and Dungannon. He stopped only when he reached "the Craobh", a house on a lough in the wilds of Tyrone. The problem now facing the northern lords was to find all their children, fostered in the Gaelic tradition over a wide area. For two days O'Neill stayed in Tyrone, frantically searching for his six-year-old son Conn. But Conn could not be found for he was with his foster family rounding up cattle from their summer grazing in the hills. Then at midnight the earl and most of his family and servants set off across the Sperrin Mountains.

According to Sir John Davies: "He travelled all night with his impediments, that is, his women and children; and it is likewise reported that the countess, his wife, being exceedingly weary, slipped down from her horse, and weeping, said she could go no farther; whereupon the earl drew his sword, and swore a great oath that he would kill her in the place, if she would not pass on with him, and put on a more cheerful countenance withal".

A year before Countess Catherine, daughter of the Lord Magennis and Tyrone's sixth wife, had told the veteran servitor, Sir Toby Caulfield, that she had been the victim of the earl's brutality and drunkenness and that, if she had 200 cows, she would leave him.

On their way through Derry the unsuspecting governor invited the party to dinner, which the earl refused as graciously as he could. When they got to Rathmullan a child with six toes on one foot, which was considered very lucky, was sent for and they "took the infant violently . . . which terrified the foster-father". By the shores of Lough Swilly all the indications were that the flight had been prepared in extreme haste. The Earl of Tyrconnell was without his pregnant 17-year-old Countess. He had not dared to risk arrest by going to Maynooth where she - Brigid FitzGerald, the daughter of the 12th Earl of Kildare and granddaughter of Charles Howard, the Earl of Nottingham and Lord High Admiral of England - was staying with her grandmother. Though the ship had been at anchor in the lough for 11 days it was not until the final day that Maguire felt he could risk arousing suspicion by taking provisions on board.

The two Earls and their families crowded aboard the vessel. Though there were fewer than 40 of them, they represented the cream of Ulster's Gaelic aristocracy. Altogether, including the soldiers and sailors Cúchonnacht Maguire had brought with him, the ship's complement was 99. Far from being bid bon voyage by the people of Donegal, there were angry MacSweeneys waving weapons on the shore, bitter that the Earls had seized some of their cattle as food for the journey. The Earls themselves reported to King Philip that at noon on Friday 14 September, 'leaving their horses on the shore with no one to hold their bridles, they went aboard a ship to the number of about one hundred persons, including soldiers, women and principal gentlemen'. For the Four Masters, Franciscan friars writing their annals in Donegal Abbey, this flight was an unparalleled disaster: