In point of fact, Mabel didn’t stay long anyway. Hugh’s eye roved again, and he admitted to it, and Mabel went home to her mother. Her father hated Hugh O’Neill more than ever; how could he now get this daughter off his hands? “Tarnished goods,” the father called her. No, Bagenal didn’t like Hugh O’Neill.
So: with Mabel gone, Hugh married wife number three and, a bit more settled down, began to plot in earnest against the English. He did so in a very inventive fashion. Up to that point, Irish soldiers won such few victories as they’d had by nerve, by shouting a lot and rushing blindly into battle, cutting the head off the first thing they saw. Or they raced down out of the woods, attacked the last soldiers in a marching column, and ran back into the trees, laughing.
The O’Neill knew that this style of fighting had limited power. He wanted a more scientific army, trained soldiers rather than lads with axes who might or might not turn up for the battle on the day.
Now, you remember from your schooldays that Irish troops had two kinds of soldiers—they were called “gallowglasses” and “kerns.” The gallowglasses were mercenaries, professional foot soldiers who were hired from Scotland and the north of England. They carried heavy swords, and if they got into a battle, they often won, because they were strong, ferocious men. The kerns were light-footed and had javelins and daggers and bows. Although they could never manage the heavy, hand-to-hand jobs of the gallowglasses, they made dashing raids on the flanks of an enemy’s column or fired salvoes of arrows from their bows.
Neither kern nor gallowglass had much hope, however, when faced with musket and cannon—which is what the English had and what Hugh O’Neill now brought into use on the Irish side. He surveyed his troops, and he realized they were afraid of nothing. But they went into battle with no support or protection. He saw what he had to do; he bought artillery, and he trained men how to use it.
For added strength, he forged alliances with Ireland’s two old friends, Spain and the pope. The king of Spain especially promised help. He had no time for the English because Henry the Eighth had dishonored all Spain when he divorced his first wife, Katherine of Aragon. Hugh smiled at this idea, and was glad he hadn’t divorced a Spanish lady.
By the fifteen-nineties, therefore, Hugh O’Neill had an army and strong alliances—all he needed now was a war. So he started one; he attacked the English fortresses in the north, and he destroyed the supply trains traveling to them. In one raid the food went into the river, and ever since, it’s been called the Battle of the Biscuits.
If any of you men here in this room had been alive in fifteen-ninety-five, you might have enlisted as a soldier in Hugh O’Neill’s army. There was prestige attached to it—you’d have been fighting for a very inspirational leader, and you’d have been one of the first Irish soldiers—I mean real soldiers, trained and with kit—to take on the English. We’d be singing your praises to this day. And you might have played a part in a famous victory. The week before last I walked the site of it—did school teach you about the Battle of the Yellow Ford in fifteen-ninety-eight?
Have you ever traveled through the county of Armagh at apple-blossom time? If you have, you’ll know of its beauty and light. You can easily see why it was the Protestant prize when it came to creating the Six Counties of the North of Ireland in nineteen-twenty-one. The loveliness of that countryside, those rolling fields and those bunches of woodlands and the bushy hedges—Armagh always lifts the heart.
That’s not to say the entire county’s perfect. It has its share of bogland, as every Irish county does. But the bog played a part in the greatest defeat England ever suffered on the island of Ireland.
There are some who’d argue with that and say the biggest defeat England ever suffered was the day they marched out of Dublin in nineteen-twenty-two, but that’s a story for another day, and that day, when it comes, will dawn bright and fair.
They called it the Battle of the Yellow Ford because of the yellow mud. It’s a nothing kind of place; you can trace the battlefield easily. It’s not far from Armagh, out to the northwest of the city, by a half-decent river called the Blackwater. Don’t confuse it with the beautiful river Blackwater in Munster, where the salmon leap into the fishermen’s hands.
One of the strongest English forts stood on the river Blackwater near Armagh. It had a garrison of three hundred and fifty soldiers who used to rob food from the local folk. They did this partly because Hugh O’Neill had cut their supply routes—and they did it because they were the local conquerors and, like many people who do bad things, they could get away with it.
Hugh O’Neill hated that there were English garrisons in his northern territories, and he was heartily sick of this particular fort. He besieged it, and he stopped its gallop—no more food robberies; in fact, no more food. After a week or so, the English rulers in Dublin heard about the siege and they sent an army north, under Hugh’s old pal Bagenal.
We Irish, we’ve always been guerrilla fighters because with a total of under five million living on the whole island, we’ve never had a population large enough to make up a big standing army. Usually, therefore, when you hear of an Irish battle against the English, it was guerrilla work—hit them hard and run like blazes. Those tactics put the fear of God in the hearts of regular soldiers in uniform who have orders to fight in disciplined lines. And they say the China leader, Mr. Mao, based his campaigns on our men who fought from nineteen-sixteen to nineteen-twenty-two.
The Yellow Ford, though, was always going to be different—it was guerrilla work with conventional warfare added, a fearsome combination. Hugh O’Neill had built a chain of command that made sure every soldier knew where he was supposed to be. This was a big change from the typical Irish soldier, who had always worked by taking a look at some big enemy boy and saying to himself, “I’ll have a cut at him.”
On Monday, the fourteenth of August, fifteen-ninety-eight, O’Neill barricaded the last stretch of road from Armagh to the fortress. Bagenal, trying to dupe O’Neill, kept his army marching north, past where he should have turned off to get to the fort. Then he turned his army and cut down through the countryside, hoping to reach the river from a direction O’Neill mightn’t have been guarding.
When he saw the state of the ground, Bagenal had his men cut branches off trees and lay them on the bogs. For a tactical move like that to work, you have to know the land well. Bagenal didn’t—and anyway, if he thought he could get his cavalry, his carriages, and his field guns across an Irish marsh by laying down a few branches of heather, God help his poor head. Besides, he was dealing with a man from the north, who had grown up knowing such treacherous ground.
The English that day wore shining armor and tall helmets. They looked grand; they carried iron shields, straight broadswords, axes where the blades had deep wide edges and plenty of muskets and cannon. The Irish bore much lighter arms—their lances had handles of ash, their axes were forged of a lighter steel, they wore no armor and were equipped for fast, raiding fighting, not toe-to-toe slogging.
They had two-edged swords, bows and arrows, and sharply pointed throwing darts, with which they attacked the horses of the English cavalry. If a poor horse got one of those darts in the neck, he bucked and reared until he threw his mount.
Knowing that the English might change direction in the hope of deceiving him, O’Neill had set traps in the ground. His men dug a long, deep trench parallel to the river on the northern side—as well as wide, hidden holes scattered across the marsh. Over these pits, full of stakes and thorn bushes and water, they threw bunches of grass and scattered moss and branches to make the ground look innocent—all the full trickery of a devious general who also knew about guerrilla warfare.
Bagenal led his men down one hill toward the Yellow Ford. He rode at the head of a column about a mile long, four or six men abreast, led by the cavalry, followed by the infantry, who were protecting the wagons of supplies for the besieged fort. O’Neill had lined up his men on the far hill, behind low ramparts of thorny bus
hes. The Irish were raring to go. Before Bagenal appeared, O’Neill had ridden up and down his own lines saying, “Don’t be afraid. They’ll have armor you’ve never seen before, and unusual guns. And their trumpets will make a terrible noise, and they’ll have many, many soldiers. But—all the more for us to rout.”
Their morale was sky-high by the time they saw the first line of the English cavalry. The fine men with their armor and great steeds charged at them—and dropped into the great trench and the various wide holes. You never saw such a melee. When the soldiers in front started toppling into the traps, the ones galloping on behind didn’t know what to do—by which time it was too late, and down they went too.
After a few minutes, when more and more of Bagenal’s soldiers were pitching into the traps, O’Neill lifted his sword and shouted, “Open fire!” Remember—Bagenal never knew the Irish were there; they were hidden behind these false hedges they had built. With cannon that O’Neill had purchased from the English, the Irish let fly their first fusillade. The minute the smoke died away, out from behind their thorny palisades rushed hordes of Irish soldiers to attack the broken English line. There was consternation and chaos and a lot of killing.
Back to their ramparts dashed the Irish, pleased with their hundreds of kills. They hid again and waited while their guns let fly another huge salvo, and then launched a second attack. All in all, it was a total ambush, and the covering fire from the Irish artillery was every bit as powerful as the English had.
After two and a half hours Bagenal’s lines were ripped apart. O’Neill ordered his men to move in. They surrounded the English and began to hack at them with swords and axes. To back them up, the Irish cavalry charged the English again and again, cutting down their cavalry, riding over their infantry roughshod.
There’s an old saying, “The ball bounces for the winning team”—in other words, the victor gets all the luck. That day, the English had no good fortune at all. Their main gunpowder wagons blew up accidentally, killing several of them, throwing up clouds of black smoke everywhere, and frightening the wits out of the men and the horses and causing stampedes. Now they had no gunpowder left. And when they looked around for some desperate hope, they saw the last straw: their fort had fallen, and the Irish were riding in.
Some English officer shouted an order to retreat, and their cavalrymen didn’t stop galloping until they reached Dublin. Poor old Bagenal lost his life, to a musket ball just above the bridge of his nose. It was fired at him by an Irish soldier from a range of about four yards.
On the battlefield at the end of the day, the Irish roamed here, there, and everywhere, beheading every wounded foe they found. They seized all kinds of spoils—food, weapons, personal possessions, and naturally, being Irish, the horses. In London, the queen, when she heard the outcome, hoisted her skirts in a fit and said she was very displeased: “I never get any good news from Ireland, nothing but calamity.”
When it was all over and everything was reckoned, the English had lost around three thousand men and the Irish a sixth of that. What a famous day! That battle took place in the course of what they call the Nine Years’ War.
When I’m going around the countryside, one of the pleasures I get from life is the tracing of great people. I have walked down the side of the black mountain of Arigna in county Roscommon to the grave of our finest composer, the blind harper Carolan, who, they say, composed the tune that became the American National Anthem. And I’ve stood by the big rock that marks the burial place of Saint Patrick himself in the city of Armagh. But I’ll never have the chance to honor the tomb of the great Hugh O’Neill. And this is why.
The Yellow Ford was his finest hour. Gradually the superior force of England had its way. The Spanish fared badly when they came to our aid—they were either caught in a trap by the English or destroyed by the Atlantic weather. Our own campaigns came to naught, and slowly but surely Hugh O’Neill was forced to his knees. The English pushed him back and back, deeper into his own lands of Tyrone, and all around him they built a ring of forts to hem him in, and finally they made him sign a pact. He was a giant in chains, able only to peep over his own parapet at a land full of alien men.
And after he had signed the pact, he powerlessly watched his lands, day by day almost, being handed over to English owners. In Ireland a man’s land was—and still is—his authority, but only if he owns land. O’Neill endured it for several years. At last he decided to exile himself. He chose Spain, and that’s why I’ll never stand at his grave—he didn’t die in Ireland.
Everyone in this room knows what happened—we call it the Flight of the Earls, one of our most lonesome days. On Friday, September the fourteenth, sixteen oh-seven, Hugh O’Neill, with his family, relatives, and friends, altogether a hundred people or so, boarded a French ship that had slipped into Rathmullan and sailed out of Lough Swilly.
Even then their troubles hadn’t ended. A storm in the Bay of Biscay drove them ashore. They traveled over land to Rome, though some stayed in France, and to this day you can find their names on bottles of wine—Phelan, Lynch, Kirwan, Haut-Brion, or O’Brien. They say that wherever an exiled Irish chieftain fought in a French army against England, he was rewarded with a land growing vines.
Hugh O’Neill, The O’Neill, died in Rome in sixteen-sixteen at the age of sixty-six—schoolchildren always remember that date on account of all the sixes. And so ended an old order.
Today, an old order ends too. I chose to tell that story here in this parish because the passing of a good man is a moment that should be marked. And today we lost the modern equivalent of an Irish chieftain when we laid John Francis O’Mara to rest.
Someone remarked, “Well said.”
Before anyone moved, Ronan rose and went to the old man’s chair. Nine years—the searching, the remote contacts, the hope: what could he say to bridge all of that? And the questions: How did the Storyteller find Ronan’s cache? From whom did he learn where Ronan had gone to college? The radio, the television—had Ronan found the broadcasts by chance?
In the excitement he raised none of these issues; he said, “I wish my father had heard that.”
The Storyteller said, “How well do you know your Shakespeare?”
“We did a lot at school.”
“When beggars die, there are no comets seen.”
Ronan completed the quotation: “The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.”
“A chip off the old block. And he loved a good story.”
“How long will you stay here? I have things I want to—to ask you.”
The Storyteller stood up. People began to press close, claiming his attention, offering praise.
“You grew up well,” he said, looking Ronan up and down. “D’you tell any stories yourself?”
“I have to write history essays.”
The Storyteller said, “Well—that’s a kind of storytelling.”
“Not as lively.”
“No reason it can’t be.”
“Will you come to my home? I know there was trouble the last time you were here, but—”
The woman of the house pressed right in and began to draw the Storyteller away.
“I promised people in Clonmel I’d stop there a while,” said the Storyteller, “and there’s a kind man here driving over that way.”
Ronan felt panic rising. “Will you come to meet me in Dublin? Or I can meet you anywhere.”
“Very well.”
“But how can I get in touch with you?”
“You’ll find me where I always am—on the road.”
“Listen. Sir. I’ve looked everywhere for you.”
But the Storyteller turned to go. Ronan grabbed his arm, and the Storyteller placed his hand over Ronan’s.
“I’ll send for you,” he said. “I will. That’s a promise.”
People came between them like a separating tide; almost like guards a couple eased the Storyteller toward the door. The nose hair man came forward.
“I’d
better take you back.”
“No, hold on. I still want to talk to him.”
Ronan tried to get out of the house; the door was blocked with people. On tiptoe he saw over their heads the tall figure in black on the road outside. Ronan pushed harder through the small kitchen and broke through—but a car had been waiting and drove the Storyteller away.
“Where’s he gone?”
“He wanted to go,” said a man. “He was very definite about it.”
Ronan watched the car disappear up the hill. Jesus God! He had him, by the hand, by the arm—and he let him go! How had he allowed that to happen? He suppressed a rising fury—he felt unsafe. But one thing at least held good; the power of the old contact had not dimmed. It still felt destined, it still felt right; the Storyteller was meant for him.
Nobody back at the house seemed to have missed him. Kate and Alison spoke as though he had not been away.
“Where’s Toby?” Ronan asked.
“Lying down,” said Alison, sardonically.
“He’s feeling off,” said Kate.
Around six o’clock the party began to decline. The hired help moved here and there, cleaning and clearing and putting away. Old friends said good-bye to Alison in the hall, they more tearful than she. As the last one left, she closed and locked the door. Ronan heard the clank with surprise—Kate started too; they rarely turned that big old lock. In the hall, Alison stood with her back to the door, her face torn open with grief.
“That’s it,” she said. “That’s it.”
“What?” said Kate, wary and tired.
“John’s gone now. He’s—just—totally gone. Gone.”
The tears came down. Alison stood and looked at them without a defense in the world. She sobbed until she had no breath and never wiped her eyes. Kate approached—Alison’s hands warded her off; Ronan made no move. For long minutes the three stood there, and Alison finally stopped. She looked from Ronan to Kate.
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