A History of Ireland in 100 Objects

by Fintan O'Toole

  On board was a crew of 600; Girona rescued 700 more from other armada vessels that foundered. Among those who drowned were the captain, Fabricio Spinola, and one of the fleet’s senior commanders, Alonso de Leiva. Most casualties were, as always, the anonymous foot soldiers of imperial wars. Just six are thought to have survived from La Girona. For those who did make it ashore, the land proved no safer than the sea. The English lord deputy, Fitzwilliam, gave instructions to ‘apprehend and execute all Spaniards’.

  In all about 5,000 Spaniards were drowned or killed, many by Irish lords who were fearful either of the Spaniards themselves or of the government. However, some of the nobles were captured and subsequently ransomed while others, notably Captain Francisco de Cuéllar, were given sanctuary by Irish lords until they could be spirited back to Spain. The wreckage of ships of the armada and the shore landings of Spaniards is called to memory by place names such as Carraig-na-Spania and Port na Spaniagh. Nevertheless, the failure of the armada, and the consequent consolidation of the Protestant monarchy of England, had enormous consequences for Ireland.

  58. Morion, late-sixteenth century

  The exact provenance of this morion—a helmet without a protective visor or beaver—is not clear. It was almost certainly made in Italy around 1580, and it reached Ireland as a result of efforts by the papacy or Spain to support Catholic rebellions. The disastrous landing at Ard na Caithne, or Smerwick, in Co. Kerry, that year, when mercenary troops funded by the papacy were executed after they had surrendered, was a prelude to a much more profound challenge to Tudor rule in Ireland. The Nine Years War of 1594 to 1603 was, for both sides, an existential struggle. The galvanising figure on the Irish side was Hugh O’Neill, second earl of Tyrone and, after 1595, a proclaimed traitor. Raised in English manners in the Pale, he later modernised the methods of raising, equipping and funding an Ulster fighting force, which he trained to stand firm and fight in an open field. He also fused religion and politics into a powerful ideology.

  Previous Irish rebellions had appealed to a broad antipathy to England and Protestantism. In 1579, James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald returned from continental military service bearing a papal indulgence for his followers and declaring a holy war against Elizabeth I, who had been excommunicated seven years previously. O’Neill, however, brought the idea of a specifically Catholic revolt to its fullest expression. The alliance he sought was for ‘Christ’s Catholic religion’. As the prospects of military aid from Spain grew brighter, he adopted the language of a struggle for ‘the extirpation of heresy’. He gradually fused this religious war with an appeal for the ‘defence of the native soil’. O’Neill translated this embryonic Catholic nationalism into a political manifesto, envisaging an early version of home rule whereby the English could appoint a viceroy but all civil posts would be held by Irishmen.

  This political strategy was backed up with military muscle. O’Neill and his allies inflicted significant defeats on government forces notably at Clontibret, followed up with a stunning victory at the Yellow Ford in August 1598, smashing an army of 5,000 men under Sir Henry Bagenal. Despite these successes, O’Neill’s revolt was weakened by his failure to seduce or bully the Old English of the towns. Diplomatically, he was limited by the unwillingness of Pope Clement VIII to declare his cause to be a crusade. These problems meant that ultimate victory depended on support from Spain. It came on 21 September 1601, when 3,300 troops landed at Kinsale—far from O’Neill’s Ulster stronghold and a dreadful site on which to withstand a siege. The English lord deputy, Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, locked the Spanish into Kinsale, forcing O’Neill and his ally Hugh O’Donnell to undertake a long march south to relieve them. When battle was finally joined, on 3 January 1602, it lasted just two hours but delivered a blow from which the Gaelic aristocracy would never recover. Kinsale was an epic disaster. O’Donnell left for Spain and died within months; O’Neill retreated to Ulster and fought for another fifteen months, but something had ended, and it was not just a war.

  59. Leac na Ríogh, tenth–fifteenth century

  One of the most poignant objects in Irish history is one that was deliberately and symbolically destroyed. The partly wooded hill of Tulach Óg (Tullaghogue), north of Dungannon in Co. Tyrone, commanding extensive views towards Slieve Gallion, was one of many traditional ritual sites on which communities gathered and kings were inaugurated. The Tudor colonisers looked on these sites with suspicion. The poet Edmund Spenser called them the resort of ‘all the scum of loose people’. The Tudors well understood the significance of Tulach Óg as the inauguration site for the O’Neill chieftains. The cartographers Francis Jobson and Richard Bartlett marked it prominently on their maps of Ulster—Bartlett’s illustration is seen here.

  The focal point of the site was a rough-hewn stone chair called leac na ríogh ‘the flagstone of the kings’, which is first recorded in the annals in 1432. From Bartlett’s surviving drawing, it seems to have been made up of four pieces: a rough base (which may be the original stone) to which a back and sides were later added. This original stone may in turn have come from a part of the hill that was sacred as an ancient place of assembly. Archaeologist Elizabeth FitzPatrick suggests it may have been ‘adopted by Cenél nÉogain’—the ancestors of the early mediaeval Uí Néill—‘when they annexed the kingdom of Airgialla and established their new royal inauguration site at Tulach Óg in the tenth century’.

  The stone, indeed, probably represented a tradition that went back to the pre-Christian past. Its rough form, barely transformed from its natural state, was deliberate. The king, at inauguration, was wedded to the goddess of sovereignty, representing the land from which the stone was drawn. The rough, almost natural shape was meant to convey something ancient and primal.

  Leac na ríogh played an important symbolic role in Hugh O’Neill’s rebellion against the Tudors and his establishment of himself as a Gaelic chieftain. Sir Henry Bagenal noted in 1595 that:

  Old O’Neyle is dead and the Traitour gone to the stone to receave that name.

  At the beginning of September 1602, nine months after the Battle of Kinsale, Lord Deputy Mountjoy arrived at Tulach Óg while he was harrying Tyrone. He:

  spoiled the corn of all the country…and brake down the chair wherin the O’Neals were wont to be created, being of stone planted in the open field.

  The pieces of the leac were said to be kept in the orchard of the glebe house of the local Protestant church until 1776, when the last of them was taken away.There was an ironic coda. O’Neill’s daughter Sorcha married a Magennis, one of whose descendants was Lady Glamis. In 1900, she had a daughter, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. Her daughter, n turn, is the current occupant of the British throne.

  60. Wassail bowl, late-sixteenth century

  What could be more English than a good wassail? From the Anglo-Saxon ‘wael hael’—good health —the word refers to the tradition of ceremonial drinking of cider that survived strongly in southwest England. In 1599 Arthur Chichester brought this wassail bowl from his native Devon to Ulster. It can be seen as a token of the idea that took shape in the plantation of Ulster: making Ulster British. Chichester was a classic Elizabethan adventurer. During the Nine Years War he was in command in north-east Ulster; led an amphibious assault across Lough Neagh into central Ulster; and obviously kept his eye open for good land in south Antrim, which he was duly granted after victory had been achieved. In 1608, he used his position as Lord Deputy to claim and acquire the entire Inishowen peninsula; in the Ulster plantation, he acquired an estate that included Dungannon, thus symbolically occupying what had been Hugh O’Neill’s base of operations.

  At first the attitude of the English government to the defeated Gaelic lords was conciliatory. The hope was that, suitably tamed, the Ulster aristocrats would settle down to administering the region for the crown. The Flight of the Earls marked the collapse of this policy. A bold new strategy began to take shape, partly at Chichester’s prompting: if the population could not be coerced or cajoled into loyalt
y, change the population, as the crown had attempted to do in Munster after the defeat of the earl of Desmond.

  Even before the Irish lords left land speculators had begun colonising east Ulster, but the process was accelerated by the confiscation of the land of the departed earls. A failed rising by Sir Cahir O’Doherty in Derry allowed the state to seize his lands too. Thus, six of the nine counties of Ulster—Armagh, Cavan, Coleraine (Derry), Donegal, Fermanagh and Tyrone—were crown possessions. In 1610, as sanctioned by James I, 40 per cent of this land was allocated to English or Scots ‘undertakers’, with the rest allotted to soldiers who had fought in the Irish campaigns, loyal Irish chieftains, the Church of Ireland and government officials. Undertakers were obliged to replace native Irish with settlers within two years and to build a castle on their lands by 1613. The creation of urban settlements was a key part of the ‘civilising’ project. Derry, renamed Londonderry, was treated separately and assigned to the City of London.

  The plantation did not go to plan. Many undertakers lacked the capital to create and sustain large-scale settlements. In 1610 Chichester wrote that ‘those from England are, for the most part, plain country gentlemen…If they have any money, they keep it close’. By 1630 the number of Scots in Ulster may have been as few as 16,000, with an even smaller number of English settlers. Undertakers had little choice but to keep on indigenous Catholics as tenants. This meant that there was less immediate social conflict than might have been expected. It also meant that Ulster evolved not as a model Protestant colony but as a much more complex and mixed society.

  61. Deposition on Atrocities, 1641

  Some objects resonate with their own times, but a few intrude themselves again and again into contemporary affairs. They remain available for use, not just as evidence of the past, but as warnings of a potential future. The 1641 Depositions—eight volumes of written testimonies of witnesses to the violent ethnic revolt that began in Ulster in that year and spread through much of the island, are objects of this sort. They contain evidence—mostly, but not exclusively, from Protestants—of murder, assault and theft. Right up to the twentieth century, they were deployed as proof of Catholic barbarism and malice, justifying everything from the campaigns of Oliver Cromwell to resistance to Home Rule.

  Pamphlets and books such as James Cranford’s The Teares of Ireland (1642), illustrated with luridly violent woodcuts, were circulated widely in England, along with hugely exaggerated claims for the numbers of dead. The depositions were taken, as the lords justices in London explained, because they might be of ‘great use…hereafter in due time, both for His Majesty’s advantage and perhaps the relief of some of the persons injured’. Many of the more sensational incidents were reported in hearsay. Phrases such as ‘believeth’, ‘thinketh’ and ‘hath credibly heard’ appear far more frequently in the deposition texts than ‘saw’ or ‘witnessed’. Yet, there is no doubt that the depositions do contain real evidence of great cruelty and traumatic suffering.

  Many Protestants were killed and many others died as a result of exposure to a bitter winter, or of famine, as they were driven from their homes. The burning of bibles and the stripping naked of victims had overtones of ritual humiliation and sectarian hatred. Catholics also died as a result of the chaos and upheaval: roughly 5,000 Catholics and the same number of Protestants perished in the winter of 1641–2. The rising was not merely a response to the plantation of Ulster: many of its Catholic leaders had, in fact, retained their own lands. The immediate context, rather, was British. Scottish Presbyterians had revolted against Charles I, who was also in deep dispute with his own parliament. The rising was thus initially aimed at exploiting the weakness of the monarchy to gain concessions for Catholics. Instead, it helped push both islands into civil war.

  Rebel plans to seize Dublin Castle failed, but Sir Phelim O’Neill, nephew of Hugh O’Neill, occupied strongholds across south Ulster, beginning with Dungannon on 22 October 1641. He issued a proclamation ordering that no harm be done to English or Scots settlers and claiming that the rebels were looking merely for their own freedom. The government blamed ‘ill-affected papists’ for the rising, and indiscriminate sectarian retaliation against Catholics prompted the Old English Catholics to join forces with the rebels. A meeting near Trim, Co. Meath, in November sealed the alliance that became known as the Confederate Association.

  The rising had enormous consequences, not just for Irish but also for British history. It fatally undermined Charles in his struggle with parliament, and it led, ultimately, to the very thing it was intended to forestall: a much greater expropriation of Catholic land and a triumph of Protestant power.

  62. O’Queely chalice, 1640

  This superb silver chalice declares its origins very clearly. The engraving in Latin on the base reads: ‘Malachy O’Queely Doctor of Sacred Theology from Paris and Archbishop of Tuam had this chalice made for the convent of friars minor of Rosserilly [Co. Galway], 1640’. O’Queely, with his continental connections, illustrates the key role played by the Franciscans in re-creating an Irish Catholic identity after the Flight of the Earls. The order established the Irish colleges at Louvain and Rome and revived their own houses in Ireland. The friars at Rosserrilly were expelled twice in the early-seventeenth century, but their presence was recorded in 1641, and the chalice possibly marks their return.

  With its inscription ‘I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord’, and its bold engravings of the Crucifixion alongside O’Queely’s own coat of arms, the chalice speaks of a resurgent and militant faith. With the outbreak of a Catholic rebellion the year after it was made, O’Queely himself took up arms in its cause. After initial rebel successes in Ulster, the rebellion spread throughout the country. The indigenous and Old English sides of the Catholic elite formalised their alliance as the Confederate Association, with its capital in Kilkenny and its military organisation strengthened by the return from continental wars of veteran soldiers, most notably Owen Roe O’Neill. It was ostentatiously Catholic—its banners bore images of the Virgin Mary.

  By the summer of 1642 the rebellion was close to collapse, but in August civil war broke out between King Charles I and his parliament in England. The resulting bloody stalemate of affairs in Ireland ended with the arrival in October 1645 of the papal nuncio, Archbishop Rinuccini, who became a strong voice of the Catholic leadership. In ethnically and religiously complex Ireland, three armed forces—royalist, confederate and Scots (the latter sent by Covenanters to protect Protestant settlers in Ulster)—became four in 1644, when the royalist commander in Munster, Lord Inchiquin, defected to the parliamentarian side.

  In October 1645 O’Queely led his forces in an attempt to retake the port of Sligo, which had fallen to the parliamentarians. He was killed in a surprise attack and his army routed. A similar fate met confederate troops in 1647 when the Earl of Ormond surrendered Dublin to the parliamentarians, under Michael Jones. The latter then routed a large confederate army at Dungan’s Hill outside the city. Large numbers of prisoners were put to the sword. In 1648 a second civil war erupted in England; the parliamentarian victory led to the execution of King Charles a year later. In Ireland, Jones’s parliamentarian army repulsed Ormond’s attack on Dublin, defeating his royalist forces at Rathmines, and clearing the way for the landing, in August 1649, of the triumphant New Model Army, led by Oliver Cromwell.

  63. Fleetwood cabinet, c.1652

  Oliver Cromwell’s reputation in Ireland is bloody and bitter. That his one personal legacy to the country should be not only particularly beautiful but also rather erotic is history’s little black joke. This very fine ebony cabinet is thought to have been made in Flanders, most likely Antwerp, around 1652. Antwerp became the leading European centre for painted cabinets, many of which were given as wedding gifts.

  There is a tradition that Cromwell gave this one to his daughter Bridget when she married the lord deputy of Ireland, General Charles Fleetwood. (Bridget had previously been married to one of Cro
mwell’s most feared generals, Henry Ireton, who died near Limerick in 1651.) If so, it was a lavish gift. Inlaid in the cabinet are ten painted scenes illustrating the erotic tales of the Roman poet Ovid, including Perseus rescuing Andromeda, the Rape of Europa and Venus being carried off by Jupiter in the form of a bull.

  When Cromwell arrived in Ireland in August 1649, he was effectively the head of a republic. Victory over the forces of the Scottish Covenanters and of King Charles I had been followed by the latter’s execution in January 1649. What remained to be achieved was the punishment and suppression of the Irish Catholic rebels, whom Cromwell saw as the perpetrators of barbaric massacres in 1641, and the mopping up of royalist resistance under the duke of Ormond. Ormond and the Catholic confederates, having fought each other for years, joined forces to oppose him.

  Cromwell had a splendid, battle-hardened army of 12,000 men. Their republican ideology was not necessarily anathema to ordinary Irish people. The royalist commander in Wexford had trouble stopping locals from dealing with Cromwell’s troops, as ‘the rogues allure them by speaking that they are for the liberty of the commoners’. Cromwell himself had little interest in persuasion or conciliation. He made for Drogheda, which was garrisoned by royalist forces. After a siege, his troops massacred about 3,000 defenders, including many civilians. Cromwell made it clear that revenge for 1641 was on his mind: ‘This is a righteous judgement of God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood’. (Many of those who died in his assault on Drogheda were English royalists or Irish Protestants.) In October, Cromwell repeated the lesson, massacring about 2,000 people in Wexford.