The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (18 page)

In Ireland, meanwhile, the effect of the battle was dramatic: in Munster, yet another uprising spread like wildfire, undoing the plantation of the province in a matter of days. The colonists were swept off the land and forced to flee for their lives: ‘the misery of the Englishry was great. The wealthier sort, leaving their castles and dwelling-houses, and their victuals and furniture, made haste into walled towns, where there was no enemy within ten miles. The meaner sort (the rebellion having overtaken them) were slain, man, woman and child; and such as escaped came all naked to the towns.’
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O’Neill, meanwhile, called on his co-religionists to rise up and follow him: ‘I will imploye myselfe to the utmost of my power in their defence and for the extirpation of heresie, the plantinge of the Catholic religion, the deliverie of our country of infinite murders, wicked and detestable policies by which this kingdom was hitherto governed, nourished in obscuritie and ignorance, maintained in barbarity and incivility and consequently of infinite evils.’
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Yet in the end, he was unable to bring the people of the Pale with him. Now, victory over the English would more than ever depend upon Spain.

Philip II had died in September 1598 and his successor, Philip III, though interested less in the Irish dimension and more in Anglo-Spanish peace negotiations that were dragging on tediously, nevertheless continued to encourage O’Neill, sending arms and ammunition to assist his cause. Elizabeth, meanwhile, had ordered Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, to take the place of Essex in Ireland – and in Mountjoy O’Neill had an opponent who understood what was needed to finish the struggle once and for all and had the will to execute his plans in their entirety.

In 1600 a substantial English naval force of four thousand men, led by Sir Henry Docwra, sailed into Lough Foyle, bound once more for Derry: this time the landing was successful, and a garrison was established in this strategic location at the heart of O’Neill’s own territory. At the same time Mountjoy set out to burn the countryside, adopting the scorched earth policy that had earlier paid such dividends in Munster. His tactics worked: large areas of Ulster were reduced to destitution; O’Neill’s lands were now being threatened from the north and east by the garrisons at Derry and Carrickfergus and from the south by English soldiers dug in along the line of the river Blackwater. He knew that if the Spanish did not come soon, there would be little point in them coming at all.

On the morning of 2 October 1601 a fleet of thirty-three Spanish ships carrying four and a half thousand troops appeared off the Cork coast, bearing down towards the town of Kinsale. But from the beginning the expedition was dogged by bad luck. Some ships got lost in bad weather and did not reach Kinsale, and the army with which the Spanish soldiers were supposed to join forces was waiting far away in Ulster. Mountjoy quickly moved to flood the neighbourhood of Kinsale with his own soldiers, seven thousand of them boxing the Spanish into the town and laying siege to it. For O’Neill, fearful though he was of leaving his Ulster strongholds denuded of strength, it was all or nothing: as winter closed in, his forces began a long march the length of Ireland. By early November they had reached Kinsale and taken up positions behind an English army now increasingly ravaged by disease.

Although ‘turning points’ seem to swirl promiscuously through the telling of Irish history, it is evident that what happened at Kinsale would change the political balance in Ireland for ever. On one side were ranged the forces of expansionist England; on the other what remained of an Irish order that had struggled to live with the Crown but was now fighting for its existence. On Christmas Eve 1601 the Irish attacked: O’Neill’s army was divided into three unwieldy formations; the Spanish troops at Kinsale never arrived on the field; and before long, the battle had become a rout. In such an inglorious manner the destiny of Gaelic Ireland was settled. Marching in the aftermath of Kinsale through O’Neill’s unguarded lands in Tyrone, the English induced both famine, by slaughtering cattle; and panic, by slaughtering men, women and children. In a moment of symbolic destruction, the ancient crowning stone of the O’Neill clan at Dungannon was smashed to pieces.

Even now, however, all was not over for O’Neill. Negotiations concluded at Mellifont in the spring of 1603, six days after the death of Elizabeth, permitted him to retain his lordship in Tyrone, to the disbelief of many both in Ireland and Britain. He was pelted with earth and stones as he travelled through the English countryside on his way to London. Once in the city, however, he was welcomed graciously by the new monarch, the Stuart James I, who was himself lately arrived from Edinburgh. O’Neill appeared to have weathered the storm. It soon became apparent, however, exactly what Kinsale had brought about: the fracturing of what had been the tremendous continuity of the Gaelic order. The old ascendancy had survived in Ulster in ever narrower circumstances, but now it began to collapse, taking with it its social codes and structures of law and inheritance. This decline did not take place overnight: well into the seventeenth century Gaelic traditions and practice could still be seen in daily life across Ulster. Now, however, they were hollowed out, struggling to adapt to the demands of new financial and legal systems that exposed the weaknesses of what had come before. The Irish language, though it would also survive, was now in steep decline, spoken by ever-decreasing numbers of people in smaller and smaller districts of the country.

A good deal of this would become apparent only in the course of time – but even as events were rushing forward, Hugh O’Neill and his supporters quickly realized that they had been swept aside by history and politics. A new fleet from Spain would not arrive: Spanish naval power had been disabled at the battle of Gibraltar in 1604; the Anglo-Spanish peace negotiations had at last borne fruit and the prime objective of the Spanish State was to maintain friendly relations with the new Stuart monarchy; and in the meantime, O’Neill’s lands were being subjected to steady encroachment by the English. On 14 September 1607, he and a host of Irish nobles and their families took ship at Rathmullan in County Donegal. This was the Flight of the Earls, one of the great landmark events in Irish history: O’Neill and his followers, beaten and dispossessed, sailed out of Lough Swilly bound for Europe. ‘We are a flock without a shepherd,’ an Ulster poet wrote. O’Neill would die in Rome nine years later, still dreaming of leading an invasion of his homeland.

Part Three

Faith and Fatherland

Chapter Five

A Rude and Remote KingDom

Ulster Unionists, fearful of being isolated on the island, built a solid house, but it was a cold house for Catholics. And Northern nationalists, although they had a roof over their heads, seemed to us as if they meant to burn the house down.
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By the end of the Elizabethan age, a century of Tudor engagement with Ireland was at last bearing fruit. The country had been subjected to sword and starvation; rebellion had been stamped out. English influence was once again spreading across the island, although in some upland areas – for example, the Wicklow mountains, within hailing distance of Dublin – there were many districts that had remained largely resistant to government control. Mountjoy, who was lord lieutenant from 1600 to 1606, reported a raid into the glens of central Wicklow in 1600, describing how government troops had ‘spoiled and ransacked the counties of Ranelagh and Cosshay, swept away the most part of their [i.e. the rebels’] cattle and goods, burnt all their corn and almost all of their houses, leaving them little or nothing that might relieve them’.
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Elsewhere, however, the network of administrative counties – so alien to Gaelic Ireland, so familiar an element of life in modern Ireland – that had gradually developed during the sixteenth century was now virtually complete. Ulster was carved into nine such units; and the system was rounded off in 1606 with the addition of Wicklow as Ireland’s thirty-second county. In Dublin, meanwhile, the foundation in 1592 of Trinity College had symbolized a new cultural confidence: the college’s role in the centuries to come would be as a centre of English and Protestant influence in the Irish capital.

The events at Kinsale and at Rathmullan brought to an end the political autonomy of Ulster. Many of the province’s Gaelic leaders had gone into exile and their lands were in the hands of the Crown; the notion that the original landowners might maintain possession of their properties – which had taken root with the original lenient treatment of Hugh O’Neill – was now set aside for good. For Ireland might have been ostensibly pacified and its old order unravelled and discarded, but it was still not regarded as loyal; on the contrary, its overwhelmingly Catholic population was, in the eyes of the administrators at Dublin Castle, pledged fundamentally to the papacy. This was a problem that required an altogether new solution – and the English response would be radical.

The Plantation of Ulster was a state-sponsored endeavour, vastly greater in scale than the sixteenth-century plantations that had been undertaken in Munster and Leinster. It provided for the uprooting and removal of the native Irish population from much of the province and its replacement by Protestant colonists loyal to the Crown and to the new order in Ireland. Certain principles underpinned the project: the first was concentration, the English government having learned the lessons of earlier attempts at plantation, when a thinly dispersed population of settlers had not always been able to defend itself; the second was segregation, thus creating an atmosphere in which sparks would be less readily generated.

The government’s plans were greeted in some quarters with enthusiasm, and the private sector hastened to take a stake in this new enterprise. Before the official scheme itself was even underway, indeed, a complex set of negotiations had resulted in an independent plantation being established in counties Antrim and Down. In 1605 the O’Neills of Clandeboye, near the small settlement of Belfast, had transferred two-thirds of their extensive lands into the ownership of two well-connected Scotsmen, James Hamilton and Hugh Montgomery. In return, the family was guaranteed security of tenure and of succession on its remaining possessions. It was a pragmatic decision, in other words, based on a clear understanding of what the future had in store. Sir Arthur Chichester, a former soldier who was lord lieutenant from 1605 to 1615, also received a large grant of land, extending from Carrickfergus west to Lough Neagh.
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These were perfect business opportunities: the lowlands of Scotland, so clearly visible from the County Down coast, were overpopulated, while Ulster itself was underpopulated; and what could be easier than ferrying an entirely new population across the narrow sound between the two islands? The first Scottish settlers – farmers, carpenters, stonemasons and other artisan workers – were landed at Donaghadee in May 1606; leases were awarded to suitable settlers, and two years of good harvests and mild winters ensured that the enterprise got off to a smooth start.

The large-scale Crown-sponsored colonization of Ulster was initiated in the following year, with government lawyers asserting royal title to six Plantation counties: Donegal, Fermanagh, Coleraine, Armagh, Cavan and Hugh O’Neill’s former seat of power, Tyrone. The Flight of the Earls eased this change of ownership, for the territories of the departed O’Neill and his allies could now be declared forfeit. The Plantation project ordained that three main groups would be granted land: ‘undertakers’, namely English or Scottish nobility, who received the largest parcels of territory; ‘servitors’, former army officers who were given medium-sized plots of land, both as a reward for their services and to ensure that security in areas of continued native settlement was in reliable hands; and finally those native Irish who had displayed loyalty to the Crown.

The position of this third group was carefully controlled. Although its members would eventually receive between a fifth and a quarter of all land granted in Ulster, few would possess anything like as much as their ancestors had done. In addition, some were permitted to hold their new lands only for their own lifetime and were forbidden to gift it to the next generation. There was also a deliberate policy of granting them land far away from their traditional home areas in an effort to weaken their personal following. And there were yet further restrictions: the native Irish were not permitted to lease land as tenants from undertakers; and while they might lease from servitors or from the few Gaelic clan chiefs left, they were obliged to pay more rent than the newly planted settlers.

Rigid as these restrictions appeared on paper, though, they could not always be applied in practice and – as had been the case in the earlier Munster schemes – the aims and principles of the Plantation began to alter according to the facts on the ground. For example, the scheme envisaged that very many English and Scots Protestant settlers would be drawn to the lowlands of Ulster; in addition, the established – that is, Protestant – Church in Ireland and Trinity College also received large grants of land. Initially, however, not enough of these new leaseholders would come to Ireland to occupy the undertakers’ estates; furthermore, in many cases undertakers actually preferred Irish tenants because they paid higher rents and were not obliged to be given security of tenure through a lease. Such circumstances led to a Plantation in which new settlers found themselves living side by side with native Irish, generating the very tensions that the planners had sought to avoid. And of course, to the general sense of cultural displacement that the Plantation brought to many members of the native Irish community humiliation had been added in the form of higher rents and absence of security.
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