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Hope dies in Rome

1609-1616: DEATH IN ROME:

Artist Thomas Ryan with a hitherto unseen recent painting of the Flight of the Earls at his home in Ashbourne, Co Meath. His major work, The Flight of the Earls, painted in the 1960s, hangs in Dublin Castle. He agreed to be photographed with the second painting for this anniversary supplement. Photograph: Dara Mac Donaill

Jonathan Bardon reflects on the seismic changes that followed the Flight

'This rumour of Tyrone's return has somewhat cooled men's affections to the Ulster plantation", Chichester observed in a letter to the Earl of Salisbury in April, 1609. In the same month the Solicitor General, Sir Robert Jacob, reported on the condition of Ulster:

"There are great probabilities that all the people of that province would easily run into rebellion if Tyrone should return, or if any munition or aid should be sent to them from foreign parts; for they are generally diseased with the rumour of the new plantation that is intended . . . They want no men, notwithstanding the late wars, the famine and the great plague that was amongst them . . ."

With furious zeal Chichester rounded up as many native "idle swordsmen" and "woodkerne" in Ulster, shipping out thousands to serve in the armies of Gustav Adolph of Sweden, then campaigning in Poland.

He need not have worried. There was no possibility that the King of Spain would fund an expeditionary force to Ireland. Besides, the unhealthy air of continental Europe was reaping a fearful harvest in the Irish exile community, ridding the English Crown of detested adversaries.

In July 1608 the Earl of Tyrconnell, his brother Cathbarr, Tyrone's son Hugh, Baron of Dungannon, and some others decided they needed some relief from the summer heat of Rome. They stayed for two nights 15 miles away at Ostia on the coast - a bad idea, as Tadg Ó Cianáin explained, "for all are agreed that that particular place is one of the worst and most unhealthy for climate in all Italy". He continued:

"Indeed, it was not long until it proved so to them, for the Earl took a hot, fiery, violent fever on the eighteenth of July in 1608 . . . On Saturday, the following day, Cathbarr, the son of O'Donnell, caught the same fever. On the Monday afterwards, the Baron was stricken with it, and Donal O'Carroll in a short time after him. The page and the footman who were with them both got the fever in a very short time."

After 11 days in fever, Rory O'Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnell and brother of Red Hugh, died. Ó Cianáin described the funeral:

"Tuesday the twenty-ninth of July, the feast of Saint Martha, the Earl was buried in the monastery of San Pietro Montorio. A large and splendid funeral in grand procession was ordered by his Holiness the Pope, and on either side of the body there were large numbers of lighted waxen torches and sweet, sad, sorrowful singing. It was enwrapped in the habit of Saint Francis, as he himself had ordered that it should be put about him."

Five days later Muiris, Tyrconnell's page died. Dr O'Carroll expired on August 18th. In the same month Cúchonnacht Maguire, who had brought the French ship to Lough Swilly less than a year before, and Seamus MacMahon who had boarded that vessel with the Earls, died within hours of each other in Genoa on August 12th. On September 15th, Cathbarr O'Donnell died in a palace on Monte Citorio and was buried beside his father.

In despair, Ó Cianáin reflected: "'It may well be believed that it was not through good fortune or the best of fate that it happened to Ireland that so many of the choicest descendants of Míl Easpáinne died suddenly, one after another, in a foreign and strange land, far removed from their own native soil . . ."

At least the Baron of Dungannon survived the fever but a year later Ó Cianáin had to add this footnote to his narrative:

"Bitter woe! . . . yesterday, the twenty-fourth of September, 1609, the son and proper worthy heir of O'Neill, Hugh O'Neill, Baron of Dungannon, he who would have been lord of Cenél Eoghain and the northern half of Ireland without contention or opposition, was buried".

Eleven months later King Philip himself wrote from his palace at Aranda de Duero to his ambassador in Rome, the Conde de Castro, asking him to tell the Earl of Tyrone of another untimely family death:

"Don Enrique Oneil, eldest son of the Earl of Tiron, died of illness here three days ago. He had come from Flanders where he served me with an infantry regiment of his nation. His death has grieved me . . . because he had great qualities and served me well, for which I was well pleased with him. I have ordered that he be buried in a manner suited to his rank in a much honoured chapel of the Monastery of St Francis . . ."

Meanwhile, Hugh O'Neill, the Earl of Tyrone, in Rome, continued to fire off letter after letter to King Philip and his advisers, never giving up hope that he could lead a Spanish expeditionary force to Ireland and at the same time making fitful attempts to persuade King James to agree a reconciliation. At the beginning of 1616, now aged 65, Tyrone appeared to be in robust health. Then in July of that year the new Spanish ambassador in Rome, Cardinal Gaspar de Borja y Velasco, in one of his first letters, sent this report to his King:

"The Earl of Tiron died on the 20th of this month in the same Christian and exemplary manner in which he lived, leaving the Countess and those and those of his nation in great affliction and without the protection he afforded them." The English ambassador in Brussels, Sir William Trumble, wrote that Tyrone had died of a fever in Rome "and was there buried with great pomp and solemnity". His body was laid beside those of his son Hugh and the Earl of Tyrconnell at San Pietro in Montorio.

THE PRICE OF THE FLIGHT

Back in Ireland even those Gaelic lords who had tried to keep on the right side of the Crown, were paying the price of the Flight. Donal O'Cathan - he had served his purpose now - was cast into the Tower of London along with his son and Niall Garbh O'Donnell (who had fought so well for Docwra in the past), never to be released. Tyrone's son Conn, who could not be found prior to the Flight, was sent to Eton only to join his compatriots in the Tower soon after for fear he could become a new rebel leader. The Countess of Tyrconnell was more fortunate: she was brought to England and given a decent pension.

The intensely class-conscious Gaelic lords rarely showed any concern for the fate of the lower orders - certainly the correspondence of the Earls shows almost no interest in what would happen to the ordinary people in Ulster they had left behind forever in September 1607. Now these people faced an influx of colonists, speaking an alien tongue, professing a religion they regarded as heretical, abiding by laws unfamiliar to them, intent on dispossessing them or, at best, allowing them (in defiance of the Plantation terms) to stay on with uncertain tenures or as low-paid herdsmen.

In time the newly arrived colonists were to find that - far from the natives being all wiped out by war and famine - the Irish everywhere outnumbered them. On lonely settlements the baying of the wolf at the moon must have sent a chill down the spine of many a colonist who had never heard the sound before. The fear of the woodkerne lurking in the thickets was better founded. The greatest threat, however, was the smouldering resentment of the insecure native Irish who worked and farmed with the settlers.

For the present, however, King James immersed himself energetically in the greatest project of his reign. He and his courtiers showered prospective colonists with enticing advertising copy. Thomas Blennerhasset (subsequently a victim of the 1641 massacre), arriving from Norfolk during the summer of 1610 to take possession of his grant in Fermanagh, wrote a pamphlet before the end of the year exhorting his fellow Englishmen to join him:

"Fayre England, thy flourishing sister, brave Hibernia; (with most respectful termes) commendeth unto thy due consideration her yongest daughter, depopulated Ulster . . . Dispoyled, she presents her-selfe (as it were) in a ragged sad sabled robe, ragged (indeed) there remayneth nothing but ruynes and desolation, 'with a very little showe of any humanitie: of her selfe she aboundeth with many the best blessings of God . . . fayre England, she hath more people than she can well sustaine: goodly Ulster for want of people unmanured, her pleasant fieldes and riche groundes, they remaine if not desolate, worsse".

"Make speede, get thee to Ulster, serve God, be sober," Blennerhasset urged his readers. And come to Ulster they did, eventually in their thousands. The great migration got under way, drawn from every class of British society: servitors who had long sought a share in the province they had conquered; younger sons of gentlemen, eager for lands to call their own; Scottish nobles induced to plant "for a countenance and strength to the rest; relatives, neighbours, artisans and dependents of undertakers; rack-rented and evicted Lowland farmers; and horse thieves and fugitives from justice. The English had more capital but the Scots were the most determined planters, as Sir William Alexander observed: "Scotland by reason of her populousnesse being constrained to disburden her selfe (like the painfull Bees) did every yeere send forth swarmes".

Later in the century, the Reverend Andrew Stewart of Donaghadee rather caustically claimed that "from Scotland came many, and from England not a few, yet all of them generally the scum of both nations, who, for debt or breaking and fleeing from justice, or seeking shelter, came thither".

Thus it was that the Flight of the Earls set in motion seismic changes in Ireland, sending powerful after-shocks reverberating down four centuries to our own time.