by Des Ekin
One explanation is that he had been due to go to London but had been warned that he would be arrested and executed. Another explanation is that he’d been caught in the act of plotting a new insurgency.
In any event, on 14 September, he and around ninety-nine followers boarded a Breton ship in Donegal and set sail towards Spain in the renowned ‘Flight of the Earls’. That phrase is itself contentious. Some say it wasn’t a ‘flight’, more a temporary tactical manoeuvre. And it didn’t have all that many earls; recent research has questioned the idea that the ship was laden with Gaelic nobility. The crew made up at least two-thirds of the vessel’s complement.
Lamented by Irish bards, the event has been presented, in hindsight, as an emotionally charged final farewell by a man who knew he would never return, and whose departure marked the passing of the Gaelic Order. Yet it wasn’t seen that way at the time. O’Neill had high hopes of drumming up support in mainland Europe and of returning at the head of a foreign force. This was not a goodbye, more of an au revoir.
Bad weather diverted his ship to northern France. His ensuing trip through Europe was far more like a modern tub-thumping election campaign tour, combined with sightseeing trips, than a sad, forlorn journey to oblivion. At Louvain, Nancy and Lucerne he was hosted with sumptuous receptions. As cheering citizens lined the streets, he wrote to Felipe III demanding aid for another invasion. But Spain and England had declared peace, and O’Neill had become an embarrassment to the King.
Crossing a bridge in the Alps, O’Neill suffered a huge setback when a horse carrying his personal savings fell into the gorge. Within an instant, he was broke.
In the Vatican he received a warm welcome from the Pope, but his hopes for Spanish aid were dashed when Felipe ordered him to remain in Rome.
Years passed. In 1615, at the age of sixty-five, O’Neill was still plotting to return home before ‘the English completely conquer our provinces’. It was not to be. He died in Rome in 1616. Four hundred years later, his role in history is still the subject of contention. No one can question his brilliance as a military tactician and as a negotiator. But was he a ruthless operator who cared only to advance his own power? Or an international statesman, a sophisticate years ahead of his time, a visionary who truly appreciated and exploited the pan-European dimension to Irish politics? Experts have come up with both conclusions, and more. Analysing O’Neill is like looking for images in clouds: you will see what you want to see.
In much the same way, some historians view the Flight of the Earls as a logical move, and others as a huge tactical error – because by abandoning his followers, O’Neill left them vulnerable to what came next.
And what came next was the Ulster Plantation. Determined to subdue the Gaelic north of Ireland, the English confiscated O’Neill’s and O’Donnell’s territories and planted six counties with English and Scots settlers. Boosted by later waves of economic migrants, these newcomers transformed the face of the northern counties and altered the course of history. But that is another, and much longer, story.
As to the others in our tale:
ON THE IRISH SIDE …
After Kinsale, FR JAMES ARCHER accompanied Donal Cam O’Sullivan Beare to Dunboy. There, to Águila’s fury, he threatened the local Spanish commander and announced that the Irish would hold the castle for Felipe. (Águila was supposedly so incensed that he offered to reclaim it himself.) After a narrow shave in which his servant was captured, the ‘light-footed’ Archer escaped to Spain. There he survived both an official inquiry and a black-propaganda campaign involving a forged letter. The Irish Jesuits objected to his plans to return home – his presence was too provocative. He died in 1620, and his lasting legacy was the Irish College at Salamanca.
One fascinating but evidence-weak theory encountered by this author is that Fr Archer was actually a deep-cover agent provocateur planted by the Queen’s spymasters. Archer was, after all, a man from a solid Old English Establishment background who secretly despised the Irish as ‘barbarians’. In this theory of events, the entire plot to kill Elizabeth was a fabrication by the Queen’s spymasters designed to establish Archer’s credentials and to smoke out Irish conspirators, and the English depiction of him as a super-nimble, supernatural force was an attempt to explain his all-too-convenient narrow escapes. Archer mysteriously turns up everywhere, from the Yellow Ford and Kinsale to Dunboy, and always gets away. And it was Archer, remember, who was most vociferous in urging the Spanish to sally out from Kinsale in response to what Águila believed was an English trick. It is an intriguing hypothesis – but there doesn’t seem to be any real evidence to back it up.
While on the subject of spies, ANDREW LYNCH, whose boat was supposedly requisitioned, has recently been revealed as an Irish insurgent sympathiser who encouraged the Spanish to invade Ireland. And O’Neill’s envoy RICHARD OWEN, who had confidently assured the Spanish they wouldn’t need horses, was suspected by Águila of being a double agent.
BROTHER DOMINIC COLLINS, the Jesuit chaplain, remained at Dunboy when Archer left. He was captured and taken to his native Youghal for propaganda purposes. There he was tortured and hanged. In 1992 he was beatified by Rome.
DONAL CAM O’SULLIVAN BEARE finally lost his beloved Dunboy Castle when Carew captured it in June. O’Sullivan and a thousand refugees set off on a midwinter trek to Leitrim. Only thirty-five arrived there. Donal Cam sailed south, settled in Spain, and founded an important Irish dynasty.
ON THE SPANISH SIDE …
The decade that started with Kinsale effectively ended Spain’s role as self-appointed religious policeman of Europe. The Spanish never sent another armada to Ireland. In 1604 the peace treaty that Águila and Blount had dreamed of finally became a reality. Five years later, Spain also agreed a truce in the Netherlands. On one level, this was heartbreaking for Felipe III, who had promised his father he would continue his religious wars. However, it meant the English privateers would no longer plague his bullion fleets.
Felipe partied on, spending a fortune on his children’s christenings. The Duke of Lerma continued corruptly dispensing knighthoods. The shifting of the capital from Madrid had ruined that city, so it was expensively shifted back again. As one writer put it: ‘[Felipe] hunted, danced, prayed and trifled, while the country was dragged from misery to misery.’
In 1605 the silver fleet failed to arrive, and the Italian banks refused to lend more money. Humiliated and exhausted, Spain suspended the religious struggle in northern Europe. It was the beginning of the end. Spain’s slow decline from power began as England built up its naval might.
In the 1500s, Spain’s celebrated infantry had been perceived as invincible. Whatever the truth, this reputation was shattered in Ireland in 1601. It never recovered, and by the mid-1600s its troops would suffer a morale-sapping defeat at the Battle of Rocroi. The glory days of the tercios were well and truly over.
THE DUKE OF LERMA continued to badger England, seeking to improve Spain’s negotiating position, until finally agreeing peace in 1604. He achieved short-term profit and popularity in 1607 by expelling 300,000 Spanish Moors. He gained all their property but lost the tax contributions of a hardworking population. Only later was this recognised as a huge mistake. In 1618, Lerma was deposed in a palace plot organised by his own son. He retired to become a cardinal. When Felipe III died, Lerma was forced to repay much of his corruptly acquired wealth. He died in 1625.
FELIPE III ruled until 1621. As a monarch, he was undoubtedly weak, indecisive, spendthrift and economically challenged. Yet modern revisionists point out that the peace agreements negotiated during his reign actually left the country stronger than it had been in the final years of his powerful father’s rule.
His wife, QUEEN MARGARET, continued to challenge the dictatorial Lerma, and in 1606 nailed him for appointing a corrupt financial committee. As a result, two of Lerma’s associates were prosecuted and the Duke left court for a while. However, Margaret died in childbirth in 1611, aged twenty-six, without the satisf
action of seeing her great rival ousted seven years later. Her husband never remarried. The indomitable Margaret had borne eight children, including the heir, Felipe IV. She probably played a major role in persuading her husband to send the Last Armada to Ireland, but just how influential she was in this historic decision, we may never know.
PEDRO DE ZUBIAUR was put on trial for, among other things, sailing home and abandoning his comrades in Kinsale after the September storm. After three years imprisoned on remand he was convicted on only one of the four charges. He was freed in view of his thirty-seven years’ service, but died that same year, in 1605.
DIEGO DE BROCHERO was under the protection of Lerma and was never censured for his behaviour after the landing at Kinsale. Brochero went on to enjoy a long and illustrious career as Spain’s leading naval expert and ship designer. He died in 1625.
PEDRO LOPEZ DE SOTO, the quartermaster at Castlehaven, was convicted on charges arising out of his failure to support Águila and O’Neill. He lost his job for four years and was exiled from the court for two.
MATEO DE OVIEDO was cleared, but banished from court. He never returned to his second home of Ireland. Yet he behaved as though he were Archbishop of Dublin in practice. He appointed two successive ‘vicars general’ to administer the See in Ireland. Both were arrested; one died in jail, the other was executed. The Anglo-Spanish peace deal shattered all his hopes of another armada. He died in Valladolid in 1610.
ON THE ENGLISH SIDE …
QUEEN ELIZABETH died in March 1603 – without ever having realised her dream of subjugating Hugh O’Neill and controlling Ireland. The cost of fighting those wars had almost ruined her: £1,255,000 over the past four years alone, a figure that exceeded her nation’s revenue by more than 33 percent.
Oviedo’s Kinsale proclamation – which she attributed to Águila – had infuriated Elizabeth. It led to a major clampdown on all Catholic priests, even those loyal to her. ‘Don Juan published a warrant from Rome to deprive us of our crown, and declare his master [Felipe] lord,’ she fumed. Oviedo had hoped to help the Catholics, but his blundering had made their plight immeasurably worse.
Early in 1603 Elizabeth was ‘seized with a dangerous illness’. But although she was well aware of the national agitation over her successor, the matter remained dangerously unresolved.
ROBERT CECIL was the man who averted a possible civil war. The Secretary had been thought to favour the Spanish Infanta Isabella as the next queen, and his denials had only fuelled the rumours. But it had all been a smokescreen. No one ever knew what Cecil was really thinking. In actuality, he had been negotiating covertly with James of Scotland. (One time, Elizabeth had stumbled upon one of the secret letters but Cecil bluffed it out, telling her it smelled foul from the messenger’s satchel and needed to be aired.)
The transition of power was remarkably smooth. James became King long before most Londoners even realised that the Queen had died. The irony, of course, is that Cecil and his great rival Essex had both wanted the same thing. The plots that cost Essex his head, and endangered Charles Blount’s career, had been totally unnecessary.
CHARLES BLOUNT became a national hero in England. Carew’s attempt to win the glory through Richard Boyle’s epic trip to London proved unsuccessful: the injured Henry Danvers achieved much greater impact when he arrived with Blount’s version of events. ‘His wounds prove his loyal service,’ Carew had to admit.
Blount became a celebrity. Poets sang his praise. A poster for a play named England’s Joy depicted the Spanish as tyrants attacking ‘a beautiful lady, whom they mangle and wound’ before being defeated ‘by the wisdom and valour of Lord Mountjoy’. One poem declared he was chosen by Jehovah.
After O’Neill’s submission in 1603, Blount made a triumphant entry to London with the ‘arch-traitor’ in tow. A grateful King James gave Blount the title of Earl of Devonshire and rewarded him with huge expanses of land. (It wasn’t his only reward. In an intriguing letter of 1602, Blount talked of ‘the thousand pounds of Spanish money from Kinsale’ and asked Carew to send him ‘my share in the Spanish spoils’. There were wild rumours that Blount had put a hoard of Spanish gold onto a ship that was wrecked at Wexford.)
Blount helped negotiate the peace with Spain. Interestingly, Oviedo’s proclamation threatened to scupper those talks, too. ‘Here they resent the fact that Águila, when he landed in Ireland, proclaimed his master King,’ the Venetian Secretary in England wrote during the negotiations. However, a deal was finally hammered out. And in another strange historical twist, as a recognition of Blount’s contribution to the peace effort, King Felipe III granted a generous Spanish pension of £1,000 a year to the very same English commander who had frustrated his attempt to invade Ireland at Kinsale.
Peace in the Atlantic benefited England as well as Spain. It enabled the English to colonise Virginia. If it hadn’t been for Kinsale and the resulting peace, modern America might have been a very different place.
Blount was riding high when it all went terribly wrong. His longtime lover, Penelope Rich, was divorced in a Church-law separation that did not allow her to remarry. However, Blount managed to get a cleric to perform the ceremony anyway.
This innocent, if technically illegal, marriage scandalised the country. King James described it as ‘a flagrant crime’ and said Blount had won ‘a fair woman with a black soul’. Blount tried to convince him with complex Biblical arguments. But he found ‘an alteration in the King’s countenance’. It didn’t really help that James loathed tobacco and Blount smoked heavily.
Three months later, in April 1606, Blount took ill ‘of a burning fever and putrefaction of his lungs’ and died. Since his children were all born outside wedlock, the ancient line of Mountjoy died with him.
Blount was a brilliant – although ruthless – military strategist whose icy efficiency at crushing O’Neill’s rebellion changed the course of history. His methods were harsh and pitiless. Judged by today’s standards, the scorched-earth policies used by Blount and Chichester (and indeed by O’Neill and O’Donnell) are inexcusable. But the most unfair accusation against him is that he waged genocide. Genocide is the systematic attempt to kill everyone of a particular national or ethnic background. Had Blount really wanted to wipe out all the Irish, he would have had to kill his best commanders and half his own army. During his campaigns, he often tried to clear Irish non-combatants out of a target area. At Kinsale, for instance, he endured ridicule because he wanted the Irish women and children removed from danger before the bombardment. That said, however, he did play a crucial role in a centuries-long process that aimed to eradicate Irish culture and the Gaelic Order.
PENELOPE RICH was devastated by Blount’s death. Three years earlier, she had stepped out of the shade of Elizabeth’s displeasure and into the sunshine of her friend King James’s affections. She was chosen to escort the new Queen from Scotland, and joined her in lavish plays at court.
When Blount returned home, it seemed that the future held nothing but happiness. However, the remarriage scandal, followed so soon by Blount’s death, turned her world grey and bleak. Aged forty-four, she died just fifteen months after her husband.
Penelope was a remarkable and complex woman, centuries ahead of her era. You sense she would have felt perfectly at home in the revolutionary 1970s. She was obviously very beautiful; she was the caring mother of two parallel families; and yet she was as tough as ship-nails. She stood up to Queen Elizabeth as though she were her equal. Like Homer’s Penelope, she used every trick and strategy available to her to outwit the powerful male courtiers. Her quick wit, charm and persuasive ability ensured her survival. If she was manipulative and Machiavellian, it was because she needed to be. Still, Philip Sidney was right – she could be poison to the men who fell for her.
GEORGE CAREW was elevated to Earl of Totnes. When he returned to Ireland in 1611 to inspect the Ulster Plantation, he concocted a plan to gerrymander election districts to ensure a Protestant majority – an abuse that cont
inued as late as the 1960s. He died in 1629. His journals, although self-serving, provide an invaluable historical source.
DONOUGH O’BRIEN, the Earl of Thomond, helped to crush O’Sullivan Beare’s last stand. When Dunboy Castle fell, he executed nearly sixty survivors. His legacy includes upgrading a minor fort – Bunratty – into a castle which is now internationally famous. He died in 1624.
RICHARD WINGFIELD, Blount’s marshal, was granted a thirteenth-century castle in Wicklow and given its name as a title – ‘Viscount Power-scourt’. It now forms the centre of the world-famous Powerscourt Gardens.
FYNES MORYSON received a pension from Charles Blount. He used it to write his masterwork, the massive Itinerary, which offered tips and warnings to travellers doing Europe. Moryson, who died in 1630, was the spiritual father of Lonely Planet and the Rough Guides.
JOSIAH BODLEY (1550–1618) surveyed Ulster for the Plantation. When the English officers funded a library to commemorate the fallen at Kinsale, Josiah’s brother Thomas Bodley, the Oxford librarian, worked to acquire the best books for both collections. And so, wrote one historian, ‘the famous Bodleian Library at Oxford and that of [Trinity College] Dublin began together’.
RICHARD BOYLE (1566–1643), Carew’s messenger to London, became Earl of Cork. His son, Robert Boyle, became a scientific pioneer. Richard’s purchase of Walter Raleigh’s Irish estates made him fabulously rich. Yet in 1631, he refused to ransom 107 Baltimore villagers who were kidnapped by Algerine pirates and sold into slavery in Africa.