The Last Armada

by Des Ekin

  The retreat had been abandoned. O’Neill now had ‘a resolution to fight’.

  Even then, at that late stage, the odds were still in O’Neill’s favour. He outnumbered the immediate enemy force by at least four to one, and he occupied what Blount described as ‘a ground of very good advantage for them, having a bog behind us and a deep ford to pass’.

  For a while there was a tense standoff as the Irish taunted and jeered their enemies in the traditional way. The heavy English warhorses snorted and squelched uncomfortably in the peaty muck. No one moved.

  Then Richard Wingfield and Richard de Burgh sent Blount a message that changed everything.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  ‘THE DAY OF TRIAL’: THE BATTLE OF KINSALE

  This was the day of trial … for if the enemy had prevailed in battle … Ireland would hardly ever have been recovered.

  – William Monson, seventeenth-century English historian

  IT IS around 10am on Christmas Eve when the Battle of Kinsale begins. At around the same time, in the streets of faraway London, citizens are dressing meat and fowl to celebrate the feast-day when there is a low subterranean rumble and the ground shifts terrifyingly beneath their feet.

  The earthquake that hits England’s east coast on 24 December 1601 is relatively minor. But it is such a rare event that it is immediately taken as a portent for the wars in Ireland. ‘Many times such signs prove [an] omen,’ a seventeenth-century historian will later declare. ‘This proved fortunate to us [at Kinsale].’

  At the standoff beside the ford near Kinsale, the earth does not shudder. But thunder rolls ominously and the air is tense, charged, electric. Lightning flashes in the distance. Mist swirls and hovers over the bogs. Everything smells of wetness – wet air, wet grass, waterlogged bogland, damp wool, damp horsehair, damp leather – but it finds a sharp counterpoint in the acrid fume of smouldering musket cord.

  For a time it looks as though O’Neill’s musketeers have succeeded in holding the deep ford, the only passage across the stream, and that they have blocked Blount’s advance. But the position changes when Marshal Richard Wingfield’s messenger gallops up to Blount.

  —Your Lordship, he gasps breathlessly. Sir Richard has found another passage across the river, a musket shot further along. There are no enemy musketeers there, only their cavalry. If you give him leave to charge, he hopes to do some good service.

  Blount assimilates the new information.

  —Tell him I approve, he replies. He is to attack at his discretion.

  Richard de Burgh, the young Galwayman, adds his voice to the plea. Thundering up in a spray of mud, steam rising from the flanks of his galloping horse, he urges Blount to take advantage of the new passage.

  —We must attack now, Your Lordship, he pleads. We cannot lose this moment.

  Blount nods his assent and redeploys his troops. De Burgh’s cavalrymen and the English scouts under their captain, Sir Richard Graeme, rejoin Wingfield at the second crossing.

  Meanwhile, a hundred English musketeers and a hundred cavalrymen from Henry Power’s flying squadron move in to seize the first passage from O’Neill’s musketeers. The English veterans are expert in the art of skirmishing. They are co-ordinated by a specialist – a Lieutenant Cowell – who wears a distinctive red cap that makes him always visible to his men. The two sides slam together in a fury of musket powder and clashing steel. In this phase of the battle, O’Neill’s men prove better at the art of skirmishing than Blount’s. ‘They poured on them a strong shower of globular balls … from their straight-firing, costly muskets,’ reports Ludhaigh O’Cleary. ‘The armies on both sides were pell-mell in consequence, maiming and wounding each other, so that many were slain on both sides.’

  Before long, Cowell and his veterans are forced to retreat until they find their backs up against their own cavalry. But as the English pile on reinforcements, the tide turns and O’Neill’s men are forced back to the river-bank. Still, nothing has changed: the English remain blocked on their own side of the stream.

  Not for long. A couple of hundred metres downstream, Wingfield, Graeme and the loudly enthusiastic Richard de Burgh are charging the second passage. The light Irish cavalry who guard the ford are taken completely by surprise. The three English cavalry officers ‘forced the enemy horsemen that kept the passage and passed over’, records the surgeon William Farmer.

  De Burgh is so closely engaged that his clothes are pierced in several places by swords and spears. Later he will discover that musket balls have gone right through the fabric, narrowly missing his skin. He has ‘many fair escapes’, as Fynes Moryson later marvels.

  Now Wingfield’s cavalry have established a toehold on the enemy’s side. Blount orders more troops to wade across to join them. ‘The enemy called off the pursuit from the side of the river and took another route across, further down,’ says Bustamante.

  But in the meantime, Wingfield’s tiny force of 250 horsemen is in a precarious position. Because they detoured down the river, they have ended up side-by-side with the rear end of O’Neill’s main battle force. It is impossible to go back – they will be cut off. ‘[Since] they could not get back without much loss,’ says one cavalry officer, ‘[they opted] to try a fortune.’

  Wingfield and de Burgh launch an all-out charge against O’Neill’s flank, even though their opponents outnumber them by at least four to one. It is not as foolhardy as it seems. In theory, the inexperienced Irish should abandon their tercio formation and scatter in the face of the threat. But if they don’t, the English cavalry are well trained in charging right up to an enemy’s front line and wheeling off at the last minute.

  A contemporary painting (reproduced in this book’s picture section) captures the drama as they charge in: horsemen clad in black leather or shining armour, half-pikes raised to strike, their black and grey chargers at full gallop. But to everyone’s surprise, the Irish ranks ‘stand firm’ and take the psychological shock as the 250 tank-like warhorses thunder down upon them. Unflinching, they hold the line. The monstrous horses close in, their nostrils flared, their massive bulk blocking out the sky. The pikemen dig their lances into the earth and prepare to take the impact. But the attackers wheel around, clearing the bristling pikes at the very last second, and gallop off to the side. It is a sophisticated game of ‘chicken’, and O’Neill has won.

  The Irish ranks explode in a mighty roar of triumph. ‘[It] cause the rebels to give a great shout,’ says Henry Power.

  However, the insurgents are misreading the situation. Just one charge, they think, and the English are already retreating! They don’t realise that this is just the first move in a repeated contest of nerves.

  O’Neill calls up his main cavalry, which is being kept in reserve to the rear of the main force. ‘[The insurgents] taking courage, drew on their horse with a cry to charge,’ recalls the English soldier known as IE.

  Five or six hundred Irish horsemen canter up to cries of encouragement. These are not just ordinary ranking soldiers. They comprise the elite of Gaelic society, ‘being all chiefs of septs and gentlemen’. At first they advance confidently on their small mounts. ‘[They] came on bravely to within fifty or sixty paces of our horse,’ says IE, ‘and there, after their country fashion, stopped, shaking their staves and railingly vaunting.’

  Probably they hope to goad the English into abandoning formation and descending into the sort of free-for-all which the Irish could win. If that is their tactic, it doesn’t work. Wingfield’s cavalry stays put and the Irish stay put too, unsure of their next move. Their bluff has been called. A direct charge against the much heavier English warhorses would be suicide.

  ‘They durst charge no further,’ says IE.

  No one is sure what happens to trigger off the cataclysm that follows.

  Perhaps Bustamante is right when he says that the English musketeers fire a volley into the Irish cavalry at a mere fifty metres’ range, taking down several riders and a horse. Carew may confirm this when he says th
e rout follows ‘a few volleys of small shot’. Or perhaps it is just the sight of the English reinforcements that spooks the Irish cavalry. Throughout all this, Blount has been steadily moving more troops across the unguarded stream. Philip O’Sullivan leaves his options wide open, saying that it happens ‘either by accident, or somebody’s cunning or treachery’.

  We may never know the true reason. But what happens next is quite astonishing. And it happens ‘in an instant’.

  The Irish horsemen abruptly turn around and gallop back towards their own tercio formation – not around it towards the rear, in the direction they’ve come, but heading straight smack into the front line of the tightly massed ranks. They are not fleeing from an English charge at that point. No one is pursuing them. But, inexplicably, they are turning tail and heading on a course which will guarantee disaster. If the Irish infantrymen hold their ranks, the horsemen will be skewered on their own pikes. If they break ranks, there will be chaos.

  Bemused and baffled, the Irish pikemen raise their lances and the musketeers lower their guns as they see their own horsemen gallop towards them, eye to eye and obviously not about to alter direction. At the last minute, the men in the ranks open to let their betters through. After all, these are their superiors, the elite who lord it over them every day. Nobody is about to tell them to go around the back.

  The horsemen blunder right through the ranks, not slowing down, until they emerge at the other end. Fynes Moryson cannot believe what has just happened. ‘[Out of] fear, they broke first through their own bodies of foot,’ he marvels, ‘and after withdrawing themselves to a hill distant from the foot, [they behaved] as if they intended rather to behold the battle rather than to fight themselves … [it was] the chief cause of their overthrow.’

  Even from the insurgent viewpoint, Philip O’Sullivan has to concede that the Irish cavalry ‘forced the [Irish] foot to open their ranks. The disordered foot took to flight.’ From the English viewpoint, Carew agrees that ‘their horse fled and their foot … brake’.

  Shane Sheale, O’Neill’s trumpeter, assumes that the cavalry are fleeing from a charge.

  —Our horsemen ran away when the English cavalry charged them, he recalls later. They broke into our main battle force and disordered our infantry. That was the cause of our defeat.

  Alférez Bustamante is equally dumbfounded. ‘We’d suffered only a few casualties [by then],’ he says, ‘[but] our forces fell back in such a way that our own cavalry shattered our own squadron.’

  There is total mayhem as some soldiers try to close the ranks while others move back. The cheek-by-jowl formation of the tercio has become a serious handicap. Watching incredulously, Marshal Wingfield sees his chance and grabs it. With his cavalry now unopposed, he swings around the enemy’s rear and charges. Meanwhile the English infantry joins the attack.

  Henry Power takes up the story: ‘[Our] horse and foot together charged through them [and] brake that gross, which consisted of 1,500 men.’ Blount adds: ‘Both horse and foot fell into disorder and brake.’

  O’Neill’s force is now in disarray at both ends. According to Power, this is a huge psychological blow to the insurgents, since the worst chaos reigns among the veterans from O’Neill’s own heartland of County Tyrone. ‘This being such a fearful thing to the rest,’ says Power, ‘that they all brake and shifted for themselves.’

  The contemporary painting shows the Irish fleeing, not headlong, but in an uncertain, desultory and very human fashion. Some of the red-uniformed soldiers are running flat-out down the road, ahead of the pack. Others are slowly detaching themselves from the ranks, hesitantly walking away, unsure what to do next, before joining their fleeing comrades. The whole scene is summed up from an English viewpoint: ‘The vanguard of the rebels fled,’ it says, ‘without any stroke stricken.’

  Within minutes, the carefully constructed tercio is reduced first into disorder, and next into headlong retreat. ‘Thus all were panic-stricken,’ says Philip O’Sullivan, ‘or rather, scattered by divine vengeance.’

  That may be, but right now it is the English who are wreaking the vengeance. They tear through the fleeing Irish ranks like foxes in a poultry-run, murderous and unopposed. ‘They fell upon O’Neill’s people,’ says the Irish annalist, ‘and proceeded to kill, slaughter, subdue and thin them.’

  A grotesque turkey-chase ensues, with the English riders galloping after the fugitives, hacking and chopping them down at will. In this carnage, a human being can survive only if he can run faster than a galloping horse.

  —If we had not been swifter of foot than the English horses, not one of us would have escaped, one of O’Neill’s soldiers will later admit.

  More than three thousand discarded weapons are scattered on the ground.

  The same contemporary painting captures the horror. The field is a pastoral dreamscape, a sweet rolling hill of green grass and brown heather, broken only by dry-stone walls and an ancient ruined church. Across this serene backdrop the English riders thunder like figures from a nightmare. They are apocalyptic horsemen, dark avenging angels who charge up to each of the fleeing Irish redcoats, their half-pikes raised, about to plunge sharp blades into unprotected backs. Some horsemen leap across the stone walls in pursuit of the terrified fugitives. The dead and wounded are strewn across the verdant hillside.

  ‘The execution … continued a mile and a half … until the horses were out of breath in running and the horsemen wearied with killing,’ one English source exults. ‘The dead bodies of the rebels on every side were like the weeds of the field.’ Another writer describes the carnage: ‘[In] each dike and gap they gruelling lay, besprinkled all with blood. One legless lay, another wants his arm; some all too cut and mangled, back and face, that streams of blood were shed in every place … wounded sore, and hurt in grievous ways … howling with loud cries … there you might see them languish and make moan.’

  ‘Make no Irish rebels prisoners! Put them to the sword!’

  The yell rises above the shouts and screams of the rout. It is Richard de Burgh, the Galway-born Earl of Clanrickard. All his pent-up resentment at his neighbour O’Donnell is exploding in a bloody lust for revenge.

  Yet the trumpeter Shane Sheale records a pathetic scene at the height of the rout. He claims that many of de Burgh’s Irish troops take pity on their fleeing countrymen. While pretending to attack them with their spears, they actually use ‘the butt end of their staves’. Without that small act of mercy amid the cruelty and carnage, says Sheale, the death toll would have been much higher.

  ‘The main battle [force] was almost all slain,’ says surgeon William Farmer. ‘Twelve hundred bodies were there found presently dead, and about eight hundred hurt, whereof many died that night. The chase, continuing the space of two miles, was left off by reason the Englishmen were tired of killing.’

  Bustamante, who reckons eight hundred died in the chase alone, says no one would have survived but for the English reluctance to spread their small force too thinly. However, Blount has a slightly different story. ‘Had not the weather been extreme foul, and our horses weak and not of heart that we could no longer follow the execution … we might have done what we wished, for they never made any resistance nor looked back.’

  More than a thousand men lie dead, but still the battle is not over. O’Neill’s main battle force is just one of three units lined up across the valley and plain. To the centre is Tyrrell’s 400-strong force with the 200 Spaniards under Ocampo. Further out to the left (facing forward from the Irish ranks) is O’Donnell with his 1,500 northwestern Irish.

  O’Donnell plays very little part in the battle, if any. Later, Philip O’Sullivan will claim that it was his troops who defended the river against Wingfield, but this seems impossible since Red Hugh’s rearguard is far away from that scene. Even the O’Donnell-centric Lughaidh O’Cleary states that the vanquished unit is O’Neill’s. It is only after the defeat that it reunites with O’Donnell, ‘who happened to be to the east of them, and had not ye
t come to the field of battle’. Shane Sheale says simply that O’Donnell was ‘not in the fight’. It may well be true, however, that O’Donnell shouts after the fugitives, calling on them to stand firm.

  —Stand your ground! he calls out to O’Neill’s soldiers, according to the Irish annalist. You nobles, stand by me and fight your enemies! It is a disgrace to turn your backs on the enemy. Never before has our race done such a shameful thing!

  But before long, he is shouting to his own men as well. They, too, are heading for the horizon. Red Hugh keeps shouting until his voice cracks with ‘vehemence and loudness’. As we’ll see, his frustration, hopelessness and despair are about to send him into a tailspin of mental anguish which he cannot correct.

  Effectively, there is now just one insurgent unit left in play. In the centre, stuck between O’Donnell on their far left and O’Neill’s fleeing troops on their right, are Tyrrell’s four hundred Irish troops and Ocampo’s two hundred Castlehaven Spaniards. Tyrrell, who is in overall command, watches as the English move in pursuit of O’Neill’s shattered main force. He decides to move to his right and interpose his flying squadron between them – a heroic gesture since he is now outnumbered by two or three to one. Unfortunately for him, there is another enemy unit moving in to his left – the English rearguard, now commanded by Charles Blount.

  In his concentration, Tyrrell leaves his left flank exposed. It is a rookie mistake and he pays dearly for it. Blount charges in and wreaks so much damage that the Irish-Spanish unit abandons its plan and seeks sanctuary on a nearby hillock.