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Beggaring the earls

1605: CRY TREASON

Lord Deputy Chichester was convinced that Tyrone had never ceased to be a traitor and that he was assiduously plotting against the Crown. He was quite unable to prove that this was the case, however. In the meantime the Lord Deputy and the Attorney General - at the same time as they were heedlessly alienating the Old English gentry - whittled away at the Earl'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".

By any standard of the day Tyrone was still immensely rich - he had retained most of the vast estates which had enabled him to spend £500 a day funding military operations during the Nine Years War. In contrast, the Earl of Tyrconnell's position was fast becoming desperate. A commission appointed in 1605 "for division and bounding of the lords' and gentlemans' livings" had ruled that the O'Boyles, MacSweeneys and other families in Tír Conaill did not have to pay rent to the Earl. And with Chichester's backing, other fertile O'Donnell lands were now being occupied by the newly-appointed Bishop of the united dioceses of Derry, Raphoe and Clogher, Hugh 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 thousands acres of as good land as any in England; if it were peopled, it were worth many hundreds of pounds by the years."

Bishop Montgomery's claim that this was all church land - which it was not - was not disputed in Dublin Castle. The outcome was that the Earl of Tyrconnell was left with only poor mountainous land and it was noticed that he was "very meanly followed".

The same Bishop Montgomery also laid claim to swathes of the Earl of Tyrone's territory. This led O'Neill to write in complaint to King James 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."

When the Earl met Montgomery in Dungannon, he declared:

"My Lord, you have two or three bishoprics, and yet you are not content with them, but seek the lands of my Earldom."

The bishop replied: "My Lord, your Earldom is swollen so big with the lands of the Church that it will burst if it be not vented."

With the full backing of Chichester and Davies, Montgomery also encouraged Donal Ballagh O'Cahan, the young drink-sodden lord of what was then known as "O'Cahan's Country", to set aside his wife who was Tyrone's daughter, and also to deny the Earl's traditional overlordship in his territory and to refuse to pay him any rent. The dispute became very public when Tyrone declared his intention of taking his case to the highest court in the land. Davies helpfully offered to act as O'Cahan's legal counsel. Meanwhile Chichester strove through spies and informers to obtain evidence that Tyrone was a traitor.