choose his future course, and there were many causes pushing him all but
irresistibly into an attitude of rebellion. One of these was the
arbitrary arrest of his brother-in-law Hugh O'Donnell, called Red Hugh,
who had been induced to come on board a Government vessel by means of a
friendly invitation, and had been then and there seized, flung under
hatches, and carried off as a hostage to Dublin Castle, from which,
after years of imprisonment, he had managed to escape by stealth in the
dead of winter, and arrived half dead of cold and exposure in his own
country, where his treatment had aroused the bitterest and most
implacable hostility in the breast of all the clan. A more directly
personal affair, and the one that probably more than any other single
cause pushed Tyrone over the frontiers of rebellion, was the following.
Upon the death of his wife he had fallen in love with Bagnall, the
Lord-Marshall's, sister, and had asked for her hand. This Bagnall, for
some reason, refused, whereupon Tyrone, having already won the lady's
heart, carried her off, and they were married, an act which the marshall
never forgave.
From that moment he became his implacable enemy, made use of his
position to ply the queen and Council with accusations against his
brother-in-law, and when Tyrone replied to those charges the answers
were intercepted. It took some time to undermine Elizabeth's confidence
in the earl, having previously had many proofs of his loyalty. It took
some time, too, to induce Tyrone himself to go in the direction in which
every event seemed now to be pushing him. Once, however, his mind was
made up and his retreat cut off, he set to work at his preparations upon
a scale which soon showed the Government that they had this time no
fiery half-savage Shane, no incapable vacillating Desmond to deal with.
An alliance with the O'Donnells and the other chiefs of the north was
his first step. He was by no means to be contented however with a merely
provincial rising. He despatched messages to Connaught, and enlisted the
Burkes in the affair; also the O'Connor of Sligo, the McDermot and other
western chiefs. In Wicklow the O'Byrnes, always ready for a fray, agreed
to join the revolt, with all that was left of the tribes of Leix and
Offaly. These, with the Kavanaghs and others, united to form a solemn
union, binding themselves to stand or fall together. To Spain Tyrone
sent letters urging the necessity of an immediate despatch of troops.
With the Pope he also put himself into communication, and the rising was
openly and avowedly declared to be a Catholic one. Just at this juncture
old Tyrlough Luinagh died, and Tyrone forthwith assumed the
soul-stirring name of "The O'Neill" for himself. Let the Spanish allies
only arrive in time and the rule of England it was confidently declared
would shortly in Ireland be a thing of the past.
[Illustration: INITIAL LETTER FROM THE BOOK OF KELLS.]
XXVIII.
BATTLE OF THE YELLOW FORD.
The northern river Blackwater--there are at least three Blackwaters in
Ireland--forms the southern boundary of the county Tyrone, which takes a
succession of deep loops or elbows in order to follow its windings. At
the end of the sixteenth century and for centuries previously it had
marked the boundary of the territory of the chiefs or princes of Tyrone,
and here, therefore, it was that the struggle between the earl and the
queen's troops advancing from Dublin was necessarily fought out.
A good deal of desultory fighting took place at first, without any
marked result upon either side. Tyrone got possession of the English
fort which commanded the passage of the river, but it was in turn
snatched from him by the lately arrived deputy, Lord Borough, who,
however, was so severely wounded in the affray that he had to fall back
upon Newry, where he not long afterwards died. Ireland was thus for the
moment without a governor, and when after a temporary armistice, which
Tyrone spun out as long as possible in hopes of his Spanish allies
appearing, hostilities recommenced, the command devolved upon his
brother-in-law and chief enemy, Sir Henry Bagnall.
Bagnall had between four and five thousand men under him, Tyrone having
about the same number, or a little less. A few years previously a very
small body of English troops had been able, as we have seen, to put to
flight fully three times their own number of Irish. In the last dozen
years circumstances however had in this respect very materially changed.
The Desmond followers had been for the most part armed only with skeans
and spears, much as their ancestors had been under Brian Boru. One
English soldier armed with a gun could put to flight a dozen such
assailants as easily as a sportsman a dozen wolves. Tyrone's men, on the
other hand, were almost as well armed as their antagonists. Some of
these arms had come from Spain, others had been purchased at high prices
from the English soldiery, others again from dealers in Dublin and
elsewhere. Man to man, and with equal arms, the Ulster men were fully
equal to their assailants, as they were now about to prove.
In August, 1598, Bagnall advancing from the south found Tyrone engaged
in a renewed attack upon the fort of Blackwater, which he had invested,
and was endeavouring to reduce by famine. At the advance of Bagnall he
withdrew however to a strong position a few miles from the fort, and
there awaited attack.
The battle was not long delayed. The bitter personal hatred which
animated the two leaders seems to have communicated itself to the men,
and the struggle was unprecedentedly fierce and bloody. In the thick of
the engagement Bagnall, lifting his beaver for a moment to get air, was
shot through the forehead and fell. His fall was followed by the
complete rout of his army. Fifteen hundred soldiers and thirteen
officers were killed, thirty-four flags taken, and all the artillery,
ammunition, and provisions fell into the victor's hands. The fort
immediately surrendered, and the remains of the royal army fled in
confusion to Armagh, which shortly abandoning, they again fled south,
not attempting to reform until they took refuge at last in Dundalk.
Such an event as this could have but one result. All the waverers were
decided, and all determined to throw in their lot with the victor. The
talisman of success is of more vital importance to an Irish army than
probably to any other, not because the courage of its soldiers is less,
but because their imagination is greater, and more easily worked upon. A
soldier is probably better without too much imagination. If the auguries
are unfavourable he instinctively augments, and exaggerates them
tenfold. Now, however, all the auguries were favourable. Hope stood
high. The Catholic cause had never before showed so favourably. From
Malin Head to Cape Clear all Ireland was in a wild buzz of excitement,
and every fighting kern and galloglass clutched his pike with a sense of
coming triumph.
XXIX.
THE ESSEX FAILURE.
Elizabeth was now nearly seventy years of age, and this was her third
war in Ireland. Nevertheless, she and her Council girded themselves
resolutely to the struggle. There could at least be no half-hearted
measure now; no petty pleas of economy; no penurious doling out of men
and money. No one, not even the queen herself, could reasonably question
the gravity of the crisis.
The next person to appear upon the scene is Robert Devereux, Earl of
Essex, whose brilliant mercurial figure flashes for a moment across the
wild and troubled stage of Ireland, only the next to vanish like some
Will-o'-the-wisp into an abyss of darkness and disaster.
At that moment his fame as a soldier stood as high if not higher than
that of any of his cotemporaries. If Raleigh or Sidney had more military
genius, if his old rival, Sir Henry Norris, was a more capable general,
the young earl had eclipsed all others in mere dash and brilliancy, and
within the last few years had dazzled the eyes of the whole nation by
the success of his famous feat in Spain, "The most brilliant exploit,"
says Lord Macaulay, "achieved by English arms upon the Continent,
between Agincourt and Blenheim."
[Illustration: ASKEATON CASTLE, THE PROPERTY OF THE EARLS OF DESMOND.
(_From the "Pacata Hibernia," of Sir G. Carew_.)]
Essex was now summoned to the queen and given the supreme command in
Ireland, with orders to proceed at once to the reduction of Tyrone. An
army of 20,000 infantry and 1,300 horse were placed under him, and the
title of Lord-Lieutenant conferred, which had not been granted to any
one under royal blood for centuries. He started with a brilliant train,
including a number of well-born volunteers, who gladly offered their
services to the popular favourite, and landed in Dublin early in the
month of April, 1599.
His disasters seem to have dated from the very moment of his setting
foot on Irish soil. Contrary to orders, he had appointed his relative,
the Earl of Southampton, to the command of the horse, an appointment
which even after peremptory orders from the queen he declined to cancel.
He went south when he was eagerly expected to go north. Spent a whole
fortnight in taking the single castle of Cahir; lingered about the
Limerick woods in pursuit of a nephew of the late Desmond, derisively
known as the "Sugane Earl," or "Earl of Straw," who in the absence of
the young heir had collected the remnants of the Desmond followers about
him, and was in league with Tyrone. A few weeks later a party of English
soldiers were surprised by the O'Byrnes in Wicklow, and fled shamefully;
while almost at the same moment--by a misfortune which was certainly no
fault of Essex's, but which went to swell the list of his disasters--Sir
Conyers Clifford, the gallant governor of Connaught, was defeated by the
O'Donnells in a skirmish among the Curlew mountains, and both he and Sir
Alexander Ratcliffe, the second in command, left dead upon the field.
Essex's very virtues and better qualities, in fact, were all against him
in this fatal service. His natural chivalrousness, his keen perception
of injustice, a certain elevation of mind which debarred him from taking
the stereotyped English official view of the intricate Irish problem; an
independence of vulgar motives which made him prone to see two sides of
a question--even where his own interests required that he should see but
one--all these were against him; all tended to make him seem vacillating
and ineffective; all helped to bring about that failure which has made
his six months of command in Ireland the opprobrium ever since of
historians.
Even when, after more than one furiously reproachful letter from the
queen, and after his army had been recruited by an additional force of
two thousand men, he at last started for the north, nothing of any
importance happened. He and Tyrone held an amicable and unwitnessed
conference at a ford of the little river Lagan, at which the enemies of
the viceroy did not scruple afterwards to assert that treason had been
concocted. What, at any rate, is certain is that Essex agreed to an
armistice, which, with so overwhelming a force at his own disposal,
naturally awakened no little anger and astonishment. Tyrone's personal
courtesy evidently produced a strong effect upon the other earl. They
were old acquaintances, and Tyrone was no doubt able to place his case
in strong relief. Essex, too, had that generosity of mind which made him
inconveniently open to expostulation, and he knew probably well enough
that the wrongs of which Tyrone complained were far from imaginary ones.
Another and a yet more furious letter from the queen startled him for
his own safety. Availing himself of a permission he had brought with him
to return should occasion seem to require it, he left the command in the
hands of subordinates, flew to Dublin, and embarked immediately for
England. What befel him upon his arrival is familiar to every school
child, and the relation of it must not be allowed to divert us from
following the further course of events in Ireland.
[Illustration: CINERARY URN. (_From a Tumulus near Dublin_.)]
XXX.
END OF THE TYRONE REBELLION.
A very different man from the chivalrous and quixotic Essex now took the
reins. Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, had expected to be sent to Ireland
when Essex had suddenly been appointed with ampler powers and a more
extended consequence, and the disappointment had caused him to follow
the course of that ill-starred favourite with ill-concealed jealousy to
its tragic end.
Mountjoy was himself a man of cold, clear-sighted, self-seeking
temperament. In almost all English histories dealing with this period
his steadiness and solid unshowy qualities are contrasted with Essex's
flightiness and failure, to the natural disadvantage of the latter.
This, however, is not perhaps quite the last word upon the matter, and
it is only fair to Essex that this should be realized.
[Illustration: CAPTURE OF THE EARL OF ORMOND BY THE O'MORES. (_From the
"Pacata Hibernia," of Sir G. Carew_.) 1. Ormond and his followers; 2.
Rebel horse and foot; 3. Rebels concealed in woods; 4. Bogs.]
No master hand has as yet made this special portion of Irish history his
own. When he does so--if the keen edge of his perceptions, that is to
say, has not been dimmed by too strong an earlier prepossession--we
shall perhaps learn that the admitted failure of Essex, so disastrous to
himself, was more honourable than the admitted and the well-rewarded
success of Mountjoy. The situation, as every English leader soon found,
was one that admitted of no possible fellowship between two
alternatives, success and pity; between the commonest and most
elementary dictates of humanity, and the approval of the queen and her
Council. There was but one method by which a success could be assured,
and this was the method which Mountjoy now pushed relentlessly, and from
which Essex's more sensitively attuned nature evidently shrank. The
enemies it was necessary to annihilate were not so much Tyrone's
soldiers, as the poor, the feeble, the helpless, the old, the women, and
the little children. Famine--oddly called by Edward III. the "gentlest
of war's hand-maids"--was here the only certain, perhaps the only
possible agent. By it, and by it alone, the germs of insurrection could
be stamped out and blighted as it were at their very birth.
There was no further shrinking either from its application. Mountjoy
established military stations at different points in the north, and
proceeded to demolish everything that lay between them. With a
deliberation which left little to be desired he made his soldiers
destroy every living speck of green that was to be seen, burn every
roof, and slaughter every beast which could not be conveniently driven
into camp. With the aid of Sir George Carew, who enthusiastically
endorsed his policy, and has left us a minute account of their
proceedings, they swept the country before them. The English columns
moved steadily from point to point, establishing themselves wherever
they went, in strongly fortified outposts, from which points flying
detachments were sent to ravage all the intermediate districts. The
ground was burnt to the very sod; all harvest utterly cleared away;
starvation in its most grisly forms again began to stalk the land; the
people perished by tens of thousands, and the tales told by
eye-witnesses of what they themselves had seen at this time are too
sickening to be allowed needlessly to blacken these pages.
As a policy nothing, however, could be more brilliantly successful. At
the arrival of Mountjoy the English power in Ireland was at about the
lowest ebb it ever reached under the Tudors. Ormond, the
Lieutenant-General of the kingdom, had recently been taken captive by
the O'Mores in Leinster, by whom he was held for an enormous ransom.
Success, with all its glittering train, seemed to have gone bodily over
to Tyrone. There was hardly a town in the whole island that remained in
the hands of the Deputy. Before Mountjoy left all this was simply
reversed. Not only had the royal power regained everything that had been
snatched from it, but from sea to sea it stood upon a far firmer and
stronger basis than it had ever done before.
Gradually, as the area over which the power of the Deputy and his able
assistant grew wider and wider, that of the Tyrone fell away and faded.
"The consequence of an Irish chieftain above all others," observes
Leland most weightily, "depended upon opinion." A true success, that is
to say, of which the gleaming plumes and trophies were not immediately
visible, would have been far more disastrous than a real failure which
could have been gilded over with a little delusive gleam of triumph.
There was no gleams, real or imaginary, now. Tyrone was fast coming to
the end of his resources. Surrender or starvation were staring him with
ugly insistence in the face.
The war, in fact, was on the point of dying out from sheer exhaustion,
when a new element came to infuse momentary courage into the breasts of
the insurgents. Fifty Spanish ships, with Don Juan d'Aguilar and three
thousand soldiers on board, sailed into Kinsale harbour, where they
proceeded to disembark and to occupy the town.
The instant the news of this landing reached Mountjoy, he, with
characteristic vigour, hurried south with every soldier he could
collect, so as to cut off the new arrivals before their allies had time
to appear. Not a moment was lost. The Spaniards had landed on the 20th
of September, 1601, and by the 23rd the first English soldiers appeared
before the town, and before the end of the month Mountjoy and Carew had
concentrated every man they had in Ireland around Kinsale.
Tyrone and O'Donnell also hurried south, but their progress was slower,
and when they arrived they found their allies closely besieged on all
sides. Taking advantage of a frost, which had made the bogs passable,
O'Donnell stole round the English forces and joined another party of
Spaniards who had just effected a landing at Castlehaven. All Kerry was
now up in arms, under two local chiefs, O'Sullivan Beare and O'Driscoll.
The struggle had resolved itself into the question which side could hold
out longest. The English had the command of the sea, but were the
Spanish fleet to return their position would become to the last degree
perilous. The game for Tyrone to play was clearly a waiting one. The
Spaniards in Kinsale were weary however of their position, and urged him
to try and surprise the English camp. Reluctantly, and against his own
judgment, he consented. The surprise failed utterly. Information of it
had already reached Carew. The English were under arms, and after a
short struggle Tyrone's men gave way. Twelve hundred were killed, and
the rest fled in disorder. The Spaniards thereupon surrendered Kinsale,
and were allowed to re-embark for Spain; many of the Irish, including
O'Donnell, accompanying them.
This was practically the end. Tyrone retreated to the north, collecting
the remnants of his army as he went. Carew went south to wreak a summary
vengeance upon O'Sullivan Beare, and the other Kerry insurgents, while
Mountjoy, following in the wake of Tyrone, hemmed him gradually further
and further north, repeating at the same time that wasting process which
had already been only too brilliantly successful.
Tyrone had wit enough to see that the game was played out. On the other
hand, Mountjoy was eager to bring the war to an end before the queen's
death, now hourly expected. Terms were accordingly come to. The earl
made his submission, and agreed to relinquish the title of O'Neill, and
to abjure for ever all alliances with foreign powers or with any of the
enemies of the Crown. In return he was to receive a full pardon for
himself and his followers, and all his titles and lands were to be
confirmed to him.
Two days after this the queen's death was announced. We are told that
Tyrone, upon hearing of it, burst into a flood of tears. As he had been
in arms against her up to a week before, it can scarcely have been a
source of very poignant anguish. Probably he felt that had he guessed
the imminence of the event he might have made better terms.
[Illustration: TARA BROOCH.]
XXXI.
THE FLIGHT OF THE EARLS.
This was the last serious attempt on the part of any individual Irish
chieftain to rise against the power of England. The next rebellion of
which we shall hear arose from perfectly different causes, and was
general rather than individual, grew indeed before its conclusion to the
larger and more imposing dimensions of a civil war.
In one respect this six years' struggle was less productive of results
than either of the two previous ones. At the end of it, Tyrone was still
Tyrone; still the first of Irish subjects; his earldom and his ancestral
possessions were still his. Nay, on crossing a few months later to
England, and presenting himself to the English Court, he was graciously
received by the new king, and seemed at first to stand in all respects
as if no rebellion had been planned by him, or so nearly carried to a
successful issue.
This state of things was a source, as may readily be conceived, of
boundless rage to every English officer and official who had taken part
in the late campaign. To see "that damnable rebel Tyrone" apparently in
high honour caused them to rage and gnash their teeth. "How did I
labour," cries one of them, "for that knave's destruction! I adventured
perils by sea and land; went near to starving; eat horse-flesh in
Munster, and all to quell that man, who now smileth in peace at those
who did hazard their lives to destroy him!"
Sheriffs, judges, commissioners, all the new officials who now began to
hurry to the north, shared in this sentiment, and all had their eyes set
in wrathful animosity upon Tyrone, all were bent in finding him out in
some new treason. That after all that had happened he should end his
days in peace and honour was not inconceivable merely, but revolting. He
himself complained about this time that he could not "drink a full
carouse of sack but the State in a few hours was advertised thereof." It
was, in fact, an impossible situation. Tyrone was now sixty-two, and
would have been willing enough therefore, in all probability, to rest
and be thankful. It was impossible, he found, for him to do so. He was
harassed by spies, plunged into litigation with regard to his seignorial
rights, and whatever case was tried the lawyers invariably found for his
antagonists. Rory O'Donnell, a brother of Red Hugh, who had been created
Earl of Tyrconnel by James, was in a like case. Both were regarded with
detestation by every official in Ireland; both had not long before had a
price set on their heads; both, it was resolved by all in authority,
would, sooner or later, therefore, begin to rebel again.
Whether they did so or not has never been satisfactorily decided. The
evidence on the whole goes to prove that they did not. The air, however,
was thick just then with plots, and in 1607, a mysterious and anonymous
document, of which Lord Howth was reported to be the author, was found
in the Dublin Council Chamber, which hinted darkly at conspiracies and
perils of various kinds to the State, in which conspiracies Tyrone, it
was equally darkly hinted, was in some manner or other involved.
It was rather a poor plot, still it served its turn. Tyrone received
warning from his friends abroad that he was about to be arrested, and so
serious was the peril deemed that a vessel was specially sent by them to
bring him away in safety. He at once communicated with Tyrconnel, and
after a short consultation the two Earls with their families resolved to
take advantage of the opportunity and depart at once. This at the time,
and indeed generally, has been construed into a proof of their guilt. It
may have been so, but, on the other hand, it may just as well not have
been. Had their innocence been purer than alabaster or whiter than the
driven snow they were probably well advised under existing circumstances
in not remaining to take their trial.