Kinsale was Gaelic Ireland's Culloden
MARCH 1603: THE TREATY OF MELLIFONT
A Bartlett map, from around 1601. The bottom image is of the Tullahogue chair on which the O'Neills were inaugurated - smashed by the English around 1602 to end the line of succession. Above it is a view of Dungannon, the ancient seat of the O'Neills, with the flag of St George flying over it, and the top image shows an attack on a crannóg. Richard Bartlett was a surveyor and mapmaker for Mountjoy, the English general and Lord Deputy, who was an implacable opponent of Hugh O'Neill. According to Sir John Davies, Bartlett was beheaded when mapping in Donegal - "the inhabitants took off his head because they would not have their country discovered". Courtesy: Trinity Maps Library.
By March 1603 Hugh O'Neill, the Earl of Tyrone, realised he could resist the forces of the English Crown no longer. For nine years he had been at war.
First he had brought to an end centuries of wasting rivalry with neighbouring Tír Conaill (modern Donegal with the city of Derry included) by organising the rescue of its young lord, Hugh O'Donnell, from Dublin Castle in December 1591. Then, forging a powerful coalition of northern Gaelic lords, this man - educated in the Pale and once considered the best person to bring "civility" to Ulster - had come close to ending English rule in Ireland.
News of O'Neill's triumph at the Yellow Ford in 1598 had been rapturously received in the courts of Catholic Europe. Gaelic lords in the south and west, and even in the mountains overlooking Dublin, now joined a rebellion engulfing the whole island. Worse still for the English Crown, the northern lords had received arms and money from Philip III of Spain.
Queen Elizabeth, however, could not allow hostile powers to make common cause with disaffected Irish to threaten the security of her realm from the west. She did not stint her treasury to fit out the largest English army yet seen in Ireland. Even so, her young commander, the Earl of Essex, had achieved little and had concluded a humiliating armistice with O'Neill in September 1599.
O'Neill had always known that final victory could only be achieved with the direct help of Spain, then the greatest power on earth. Twice Philip had sent armadas to Ireland only to hear that they had been scattered by storms. Then, as the northern lords awaited a third attempt, Elizabeth had found a general equal to the task of crushing the northern lords - Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy.
Mountjoy had mounted a three-pronged assault: he attacked O'Neill's formidable entrenchments in the Moyry Pass from Dundalk; Sir Henry Docwra drove a wedge between O'Neill and O'Donnell, campaigning upstream from Derry; and, based in Carrickfergus, Sir Arthur Chichester ravaged the heart of O'Neill's earldom around Dungannon by launching raids from Antrim across Lough Neagh.
The northern lords had fought on at this stage only because of the promise of Spanish aid. When the Spaniards did come, in the autumn of 1601, they had landed at Kinsale 300 miles from the heart of the rebellion. O'Neill and O'Donnell had risked all by marching south over frozen defiles and wading river after river, often up to the chest, to surround Mountjoy's army besieging the Spanish.
Had the Gaelic Irish but known, they could have starved the English into submission. Instead, O'Neill reluctantly gave in to O'Donnell's pleas for action and made a disastrous dawn attack on Christmas Eve.
Kinsale had been Gaelic Ireland's Culloden: all of O'Neill's previous triumphs had been wiped out at a stroke. (The Battle of Culloden in 1746 ended Jacobite hopes of restoring the House of Stuart to the throne.) The Spanish capitulated and returned home; O'Donnell sailed to Spain to seek further help, only to be poisoned in Simancas by an English spy, though this is contested by some, and O'Neill withdrew with the remnants of his army back to Ulster. As the English commanders slaughtered cattle and destroyed stores of butter and corn a terrible famine had swept Ulster. Fighting a rearguard campaign in the woody fastness of Glenconkeyne, O'Neill was forced to seek terms.
Horrified by the cost of the war in Ireland, Elizabeth now dropped her insistence on unconditional surrender. O'Neill eagerly accepted the offer of a safe-conduct made by Sir Garret Moore, who took him to his estate of Mellifont Abbey in Louth on March 30th, 1603. The terms were more lenient than he could have dared to hope for. Provided he renounced the Gaelic title, The O'Neill, he remained the Earl of Tyrone and retained his traditional territory and - except for Church lands - this was formally recognised in English law as his personal possession. In addition O'Neill maintained his overlord authority over "O'Cahan's Country", most of the modern county of Derry. Mountjoy was eager for agreement, for he knew, and O'Neill did not, that Elizabeth had died six days earlier - the Lord Deputy could not be certain that James I would support him as the Queen had done. He had to act quickly - Tyrone could offer allegiance to a new monarch, claiming that it had been Elizabeth's pugnacious policies which had driven him into rebellion. In any case, the English Privy Council had been protesting that it was the war in Ireland, rather than the conflict with Spain, which was impoverishing England.
AN UNCERTAIN PEACE
Given the straits to which he had been reduced by the beginning of 1603, O'Neill could consider the Treaty of Mellifont a diplomatic triumph. On June 2nd, 1603, Mountjoy left Ireland in company with Hugh O'Neill and the new lord of Tír Conaill, Rory O'Donnell. In the pinnace Tramontana they narrowly missed shipwreck and on the road to Beaumaris, in north Wales, the Earl of Tyrone was pelted with stones and mud by women who had lost their menfolk in the Irish wars. In London they were well received by James I who duly created O'Donnell the Earl of Tyrconnell. And it was particularly reassuring that the following year an Act of Oblivion declared that all "offences against the Crown" committed before the King's accession were to be "pardoned, remitted, and utterly extinguished".
This generous pardon infuriated the "servitors", those who had fought for the Crown in the long wars in Ireland. One of them, Sir John Harrington, observed:
"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 horseflesh 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 . . ."
O'Neill returned to Ulster to entice back to his lands his tenants who had fled the terror and famine during the dying months of the rebellion. He appeared to have become a model subject of the Crown and even provided victuals for garrisons placed there. Mountjoy, now the Duke of Devonshire, did not return as Lord Deputy but as a Privy Counsellor he remained a champion of the terms of the Treaty of Mellifont and it seems he had become quite taken with his former adversary. The elderly Sir George Carey, who took over as Lord Deputy, made no attempt to clip Tyrone's wings.
Meanwhile, the servitors continued bitterly to resent the Crown's policy. Many had fully expected to be rewarded for their services by generous grants of land at the expense of the northern Gaelic lords. Their cause was eloquently championed by Sir John Davies who had survived being disbarred for smashing a cudgel over a fellow lawyer's head to become Ireland's Attorney General. He yearned to impose English law to the full 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 . . . 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".
The servitors' moment arrived when Sir Arthur Chichester was sworn in as Lord Deputy in February 1605. A former governor of Carrickfergus, Chichester had been one of Elizabeth's most ruthless commanders - a soldier of acknowledged courage who had been knighted by Henry of Navarre when fighting for the Protestant cause in France and who had accompanied Sir Francis Drake on his last voyage. He now led the relentless campaign by royal officials to undermine the authority of Tyrone and Tyrconnell and to erode their economic base. The last restraint was removed when Mountjoy died in April 1606 - perhaps the first high-profile English victim of addiction to tobacco.
RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION
Even at the height of his power O'Neill had been unable to win over to his side the "Old English". These descendants of 12th and 13th century Norman conquerors, and the people they had brought over the Irish Sea with them, were still proud to be called English and many had fought against the Gaelic lords in the Lord Deputy's armies. But the Old English also were Catholics, loyal to the Pope.
Now the reckless policies of King James, implemented with savage enthusiasm by Chichester, threatened to drive the Old English into the arms of disaffected Gaelic Irish. During his sojourn in London Tyrone had risked presenting a petition drawn up by lords of the Pale seeking religious toleration. Two years later the Old English were startled to find that the king was determined to make them Protestants. James issued a proclamation in 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".
Chichester launched a programme of religious persecution on a scale never witnessed before in Ireland. He now rigidly enforced an earlier law which fined ordinary Catholics a shilling for every Sunday they failed to attend a Protestant church. Letters were delivered to 16 leading Catholic gentlemen in Dublin fining them £100 each. A petition against this persecution was sent just when news arrived of the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, a Catholic conspiracy to blow up the Houses of Parliament in London in November 1605. This was no time for Catholics in either England or Ireland to demand their rights.
The petitioners were put under house arrest. Sir Patrick Barnewall and other Old English Catholic leaders were cast into the dungeons of Dublin Castle. In Drogheda Chichester personally led the campaign to force Catholics to attend Protestant services. One Catholic gentleman went so far as the church door and then would go no further. Whereupon Chichester "told him, blandly at first, and then 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 macebearer attacked him so savagely that he fell to the ground like a dead man, and the viceroy 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 violently 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 Sir Henry Brouncker, Lord President of Munster, orchestrated a similar reign of terror in the south: "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 . . ."
Little wonder then that, on hearing Sir Patrick Barnewall had been locked up in the Tower of London, some Old English lords began to plot a rising. And it seems that the man who was doing most to encourage them was none other than Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone.
