THE RULE OF THE O'NEILLS.
Shane O'Neill was a man of extraordinary ability and tremendous
energy, as the English found to their cost. He was guilty of atrocious
deeds; but he had too many examples in those lawless times encouraging
him to sacrifice the most sacred ties to his ambition. He resolved to
seize the chieftainship by deposing his father and banishing him to
the Pale, where, after passing some years in captivity, he died. He
was, no doubt, urged to do this, lest by some chance the son of the
baron of Dungannon should be adopted by England as the rightful heir,
and made Earl of Tyrone. This title he spurned, and proclaimed himself
the O'Neill, the true representative of the ancient kings of Ulster,
to which office he was elected by his people, taking the usual oath
with his foot upon the sacred stone. This was an open defiance of
English power, and he prepared to abide the consequences. He thought
the opportunity a favourable one to recover the supremacy of his
ancestors over the O'Donels. He accordingly mustered a numerous army,
and marched into Tyrconnel, where he was joined by Hugh O'Donel,
brother of Calvagh, the chief, with other disaffected persons of the
same clan. O'Donel had recourse to stratagem. Having caused his cattle
to be driven out of harm's way, he sent a spy into the enemy's camp,
who mixed with the soldiers, and returning undiscovered, he undertook
to guide O'Donel's army to O'Neill's tent, which was distinguished by
a great watch-fire, and guarded by six galloglasses on one side and as
many Scots on the other. The camp, however, was taken by surprise
in the dead of night, and O'Neill's forces, careless or asleep, were
slaughtered and routed without resistance. Shane himself fled for his
life, and, swimming across three rivers, succeeded in reaching his own
territory. This occurred the year before he cast off his allegiance
to England. He was required to appear before Elizabeth in person to
explain the grounds on which he had claimed the chieftainship. He
consented, on condition that he got a safe-conduct and money for the
expenses of his journey. At the same time he sent a long letter to the
Queen, complaining of the treatment he had received, and defending his
pretensions. The letter is characteristic of the man and of the times.
He said: 'The deputy has much ill-used me, your Majesty; and now that
I am going over to see you, I hope you will consider that I am but
rude and uncivil, and do not know my duty to your Highness, nor yet
your Majesty's laws, but am one brought up in wildness, far from all
civility. Yet have I a good will to the commonwealth of my country;
and please your Majesty to send over two commissioners that you can
trust, that will take no bribes, nor otherwise be imposed on, to
observe what I have done to improve the country, and hear what my
accusers have to say; and then let them go into the Pale, and hear
what the people say of your soldiers, with their horses, and their
dogs, and their concubines. Within this year and a half, three hundred
farmers are come from the English Pale to live in my country, where
they can be safe.
'Please your Majesty, your Majesty's money here is not so good as your
money in England, and will not pass current there. Please your Majesty
to send me three thousand pounds in English money to pay my expenses
in going over to you, and when I come back I will pay your deputy
three thousand pounds Irish, such as you are pleased to have current
here. Also I will ask your Majesty to marry me to some gentlewoman of
noble blood meet for my vocation. I will make Ireland all that your
Majesty wishes for you. I am very sorry your Majesty is put to such
expense. If you will trust it to me, I will undertake that in three
years you will have a revenue, where now you have continual loss.'
Shane suspected evil designs on the part of the English, and not
without reason. The object of the summons to England was to detain him
there with 'gentle talk' till Sussex could return to his command with
an English army powerful enough to subjugate Ulster. For this purpose
such preparations were made by the English Government in men and
money, 'that rebellion should have no chance; and,' says Mr. Froude,
'so careful was the secresy which was observed, to prevent Shane from
taking alarm, that a detachment of troops sent from Portsmouth sailed
with sealed orders, and neither men nor officers knew that Ireland was
their destination till they had rounded the Land's End.' The English
plans were well laid. Kildare, whom Elizabeth most feared, had
accepted her invitation to go to London, and thus prevented any
movement in the south, while O'Donel was prepared to join the English
army on its advance into Ulster; and the Scots, notwithstanding their
predilection for Mary Stuart, were expected to act as Argyle and his
sister should direct. But Shane had a genius for intrigue as well
as Elizabeth, and he was far more rapid than her generals in the
execution of his plans. By a master-stroke of policy he disconcerted
their arrangements. He had previously asked the Earl of Argyle to give
him his daughter in marriage, in order that he might strengthen his
alliance with the Ulster Scots. It is true that she had been already
married to his rival, O'Donel; but that was a small difficulty in his
way. The knot was tied, but he had no hesitation in cutting it with
his sword. 'The countess' was well educated for her time. She was also
a Protestant, and the government had hopes that her influence would be
favourable to 'civility and the Reformation' among the barbarians of
the north. But whatever advantages the presence of the fair Scottish
missionary might bring, Shane O'Neill did not see why they should
not be all his own, especially as he had managed somehow to produce
a favourable impression on her heart. Accordingly he made a dash
into Tyrconnel, and carried off both the lady and her husband to his
stronghold, Shane's Castle, on the banks of Lough Neagh. Her Scotch
guard, though fifteen hundred strong, had offered no resistance.
O'Donel was shut up in a prison, and his wife became the willing
paramour of the captor. 'The affront to McConnell was forgiven or
atoned for by private arrangement, and the sister of the Earl of
Argyle--an educated woman for her time, not unlearned in Latin,
speaking French and Italian, counted sober, wise, and no less
subtle--had betrayed herself and her husband. The O'Neills, by this
last manoeuvre, became supreme in Ulster. Deprived of their head, the
O'Donels sank into helplessness. The whole force of the province, such
as it was, with the more serious addition of several thousand Scotch
marauders, was at Shane's disposal, and thus provided, he thought
himself safe in defying England to do its worst.'[1]
[Footnote 1: Froude, Ibid.]
Meantime, Sussex had arrived in Dublin preceded by his English forces.
He made a rapid preliminary movement to the north, and seized the
Cathedral of Armagh, in order to make it a fortified depôt for his
stores. He then fell back into Meath, where he was joined by Ormond
with flying companies of galloglasses. Soon after a singular attack
was made on the English garrison at Armagh. Seeing a number of kernes
scattered about the town, the officer in command sallied out upon
them, when O'Neill suddenly appeared, accompanied by the Catholic
Archbishop, on a hill outside the walls. 'The English had but time to
recover their defences when the whole Irish army, led by a procession
of monks, and every man carrying a fagot, came on to burn the
cathedral over their heads. The monks sang a mass; the primate walked
three times up and down the lines, willing the rebels to go forward,
for God was on their side. Shane swore a great oath not to turn his
back while an Englishman was alive; and with scream and yell his men
came on. _Fortunately there were no Scots among them._ The English,
though out-numbered ten to one, stood steady in the churchyard, and,
after a sharp hand-to-hand fight, drove back the howling crowd. The
Irish retired into the friars' houses outside the cathedral close, set
them on fire, and ran for their lives.'
'So far,' adds Mr. Froude, 'all was well. After this there was no more
talk of treating, and by the 18th, Sussex and Ormond were themselves
at Armagh with a force--had there been skill to direct it--sufficient
to have swept Tyrone from border to border.'
The English historian exults in the valour of the small garrison of
his countrymen, well-disciplined and sheltered behind a strong wall,
in resisting the assault of a howling multitude of mere Irish, and he
observes significantly, that 'fortunately there were no _Scots_ among
them.' But he is obliged immediately after to record an Irish victory
so signal that, according to the lord deputy himself, 'the fame of the
English army so hardly gotten, was now vanished.' Yet Mr. Froude does
not, in this, lay the blame of defeat upon the _nationality_ of the
vanquished. It is only the Irish nation that is made the scape-goat in
such cases.
It was July, but the weather was wet, the rivers were high, Ormond was
ill, Sussex would not leave his friend, and so the English army stayed
in town doing nothing till the end of the month, when their failing
provisions admonished them that an Irish hosting would be desirable.
O'Neill, who seems to have been aware of the state of things,
presented the appropriate temptation. Spies brought the lord deputy
word that in the direction of Cavan there were herds of cows, which
an active party might easily capture. These spies, with ardent
professions of loyalty, offered to guide the English troops to the
place where the booty would be found, their object being to draw them
among bogs and rivers where they might be destroyed. The lord deputy
did not think it necessary to accompany this host, which consisted of
200 horse, 500 men-at-arms, and some hundreds of the loyal Irish of
the Pale. Shane intended to attack them the first night while resting
on their march. But they escaped by an alteration of the route. Next
morning they were marching on the open plain, miles from any shelter
of hill or wood, when the Irish chief, with less than half their
number, pursued them, and fell upon the cavalry in the rear, with
the cry, '_Laundarg Aboo_--the Bloody Hand--Strike for O'Neill!' The
English cavalry commanded by Wingfield, seized with terror, galloped
into the ranks of their own men-at-arms, rode them down, and
extricated themselves only to fly panic-stricken from the field to the
crest of an adjoining hill. Meantime, Shane's troopers rode through
the broken ranks, cutting down the footmen on all sides. The yells and
cries were heard far off through the misty morning air. Fitzwilliam,
who had the chief command, was about a mile in advance at the head
of another body of cavalry, when a horseman was observed by him,
galloping wildly in the distance and waving his handkerchief as a
signal. He returned instantly, followed by his men, and flung himself
into the _mêleé_. Shane receiving such a charge of those few men, and
seeing more coming after, ran no farther risk, blew a recall note,
and withdrew unpursued. Fitzwilliam's courage alone prevented the army
from being annihilated. Out of 500 English 50 lay dead, and 50 more
were badly wounded. The survivors fell back to Armagh 'so _dismayed_
as to be unfit for farther service.' Pitiable were the lamentations
of the lord deputy to Cecil on this catastrophe. It was, said he, 'by
cowardice the dreadfullest beginning that ever was seen in Ireland.
Ah! Mr. Secretary, what unfortunate star hung over me that day to draw
me, that never could be persuaded to be absent from the army at any
time--to be then absent for a little disease of another man? _The
rearward was the best and picked soldiers in all this land._ If I
or any stout man had been that day with them, we had made an end of
Shane--which is now farther off than ever it was. Never before durst
Scot or Irishman look on Englishmen in plain or wood since I was here;
and now Shane, in a plain three miles away from any wood, and where I
would have asked of God to have had him, hath, with 120 horse, and a
few Scots and galloglasse, _scarce half in numbers_, charged our whole
army, and by the cowardice of one wretch whom I hold dear to me as
my own brother, was like in one hour to have left not one man of that
army alive, and after to have taken me and the rest at Armagh. The
fame of the English army, so hardly gotten, is now vanished, and I,
wretched and dishonoured, by the vileness of other men's deeds.'
This is real history that Mr. Froude has given us. It places the
actors before us, enables us to discern their characters, tells us
who they are and what they have done. It shows also the value and
the necessity of documentary evidence for establishing the truth
of history. How different from the vague, uncertain, shadowy
representations derived from oral tradition, or mere reports,
though contemporary, circulated from mouth to mouth, and exaggerated
according to the interests of one party or the other. Let us for
illustration compare Mr. Froude's vivid picture of this battle, so
disastrous to the English, with the account given of the same event by
the Annalists called the Four Masters. These writers had taken great
pains to collect the most authentic records of the various Irish
tribes from the invasion by Henry II. to the period of which we
are writing. They were intensely Irish, and of course glad of any
opportunity of recording events creditable to the valour of their
countrymen. They lived in Donegal, under the protection of O'Donel,
but they showed themselves quite willing to do full justice to his
great rival O'Neill. The presence of the lord deputy, the Earl of
Ormond, and other great men at Armagh, with a select English army,
would naturally have roused their attention, and when that army was
encountered and vanquished in the open field by the Irish general, we
should have expected that the details of such a glorious event would
have been collected with the greatest care from the accounts of
eye-witnesses. The bards and historiographers should have been on the
alert to do justice to their country on so great an occasion. They
were on the spot, they were beside the victors, and they had no excuse
whatever for ignorance. Yet here is the miserably cold, _jejune_,
feeble, and imperfect record which we find in the Annals of the Four
Masters:--'The Lord Justice of Ireland, namely Thomas Fitzwalter
(Sussex), marched into Tyrone to take revenge for the capture of
Caloach O'Donel, and also for his own quarrels with the country.
He encamped with a great army at Armagh, and constructed deep
entrenchments and impregnable ramparts about the great church of
Armagh, which he intended to keep constantly guarded. O'Neill, i.e.
John, having received intelligence of this, sent a party of his
faithful men and friends with Caloach O'Donel to guard and keep
him from the Lord Justice, and they conveyed him from one island to
another, in the recesses and sequestered places of Tyrone. After some
time the Lord Justice sent out from the camp at Armagh, a number of
his captains with 1000 men to take some prey and plunder in Oriel.
O'Neill, having received private information and intelligence of those
great troops marching into Oriel, proceeded privately and silently to
where they were, and came up to them after they had collected their
prey; a battle ensued in which many were slain on both sides; and
finally the preys were abandoned, and fell into the hands of their
original possessors on that occasion.'
That is the whole account of the most signal victory over the English
that had crowned the arms of Ulster during those wars! Not a word of
the disparity of the forces, or the flight of the English cavalry,
or the slaughter of the Englishmen-at-arms, or the humiliation and
disabled condition of the garrison at Armagh. Equally unsatisfactory
is the record of the subsequent march through Tyrone by Sussex, in the
course of which his army slaughtered 4000 head of cattle, which they
could not drive away. Of this tremendous destruction of property the
Four Masters do not say a word. Such omissions often occur in their
annals, even when dealing with contemporary events. Uncritical as they
were and extremely credulous, how can we trust the records which they
give of remote ages?