Red Hugh O’Donnell (c.1573–1602) was the son of a sixteenth-century lord of Tír Chonaill, more or less Co. Donegal today. His mother was the chieftain’s second wife, and Red Hugh was several decimal points away from the title. There were at least four other challengers among his kinsmen. Before he was fifteen, a marriage was arranged for him with the neighbouring lordship, the O’Neills of Tír Eoghain. Unity breaking out in Ulster alarmed Queen Elizabeth I’s lord deputy in Dublin. He knew that Gaelic harmony could only be subversive.
Fostered out among the lesser chieftains, Red Hugh had taken part in his first feuding raid at the age of twelve, riding with an O’Gallagher against the O’Rourkes of Breifne. He spent about three years with MacSweeney Doe whose blocky thug of a castle still hunches at the head of Sheephaven Bay in the far north of Tír Chonaill, its walleyed stare fixed on the estuary.
The main O’Donnell castle, his father’s home, stood at the mouth of the River Eske in the crook of Donegal Bay. Once described as ‘the largest and strongest fortress in all of Ireland’, it has recently been restored. Jostled by the hotels and shops of Donegal town, it stands its ground by grumpy force of character.
Red Hugh’s mother, Iníon Dubh, was a ‘great bringer in of Scots’ by reputation. It seemed she had only to whistle and mercenaries came pouring into Donegal. Red Hugh shot up the list of succession when she took a violent hand, shortening the odds with Shakespearean efficiency.
O’Donnell’s short life hinged repeatedly on dramatic journeys. He lived hard, he died young, and his biographer sainted him. His life story was grafted, complete, into the Annals of the Four Masters, a record of Irish history compiled a generation after his death. Though his adventures caught the public imagination down the centuries, he never quite earned his reputation as the key rebel of his time. That role belongs to his ally and in-law, Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone.
Lughaidh Ó Cléirigh, who wrote Beatha Aodha Ruaidh Uí Dhomhnaill, the ‘Life of Red Hugh O’Donnell’, was a contemporary. His family had been historians to the O’Donnells for hundreds of years. The political and military judgements are gloriously skewed in favour of the O’Donnells by the house historian, but the ‘Life’ does not stand entirely on trust. There are other sources: fat mirrors and thin mirrors, all flawed, but each giving clues to the others’ distortions.
Red Hugh was snapped up by the English as a hostage at the age of fourteen. His father had reneged on a deal to hand over a younger son as a pledge, a human guarantee, and to pay an annual rent of cattle to the lord deputy in Dublin. The status of a pledge varied between house-guest, hostage and abject prisoner. O’Donnell was destined for the third category.
KIDNAP
On 29 September 1587, a vessel arrived in Lough Swilly, a long inlet on the northeast coast of Tír Chonaill. The ship has been identified as the Matthew, and the captain was Nicholas Barnes of Dublin.1 He would earn £100 for the job. In the bitter words of the ‘Life’ by Ó Cléirigh, ‘A black-prowed deceiving ship was equipped in Dublin with a malevolent, warlike crew ….’
Disguised as a trading vessel, the ship anchored in Lough Swilly well out in the current, opposite an O’Sweeney castle at Rathmullan. The crew went ashore, posing as merchants in wine and beer. The people of the castle, the Fanad Sweeneys, had priority and got drunk first. Soon the entire neighbourhood followed suit.
The young Red Hugh O’Donnell was in the area with some companions, visiting Rathmullan Castle. Hospitality being a prime virtue, MacSweeney Fanad sent out for more drink to impress his guests. But stocks had run dry and the merchants had returned to the ship. They invited MacSweeney to bring his visitors on board, where they might dip into a private supply.
Launching a small boat that lay on the shore, the Donegal men rowed themselves out into the bay. They can almost be heard smacking their lips in the process, or maybe it’s just the splash of keen oars. As if to increase the irony, the crew allowed aboard only the prisoners they particularly wanted, including Red Hugh and a couple of prime young nobles – this according to Ó Cléirigh in the ‘Life’. No doubt, the rejects felt hard done by at first. When the plot was revealed, their relief at having escaped must have been clouded by the implication that they were not worth capturing.
There was nothing random about the raid. Perrott, Queen Elizabeth’s lord deputy, had earlier proposed the capture of the O’Donnell chieftain, his wife and their son, Red Hugh, ‘by sending them a boat with wines’. The Irish were known to be particularly fond of sack, the sweet wine associated with Falstaff and Prince Hal.
Ó Cléirigh is tightlipped in the ‘Life’, protecting local reputations. An account by the historian, Philip O’Sullivan, written a few years later, rips the curtain aside. He says that both MacSweeney Doe and MacSweeney Fanad were on board, along with a very senior O’Gallagher. Frantic bartering ensued. MacSweeney Fanad traded his son, Dónal Gorm, as a hostage, and was released. O’Gallagher traded a nephew. A peasant boy was sent aboard dressed as the son of MacSweeney Doe, and that cunning chieftain was allowed to leave. On their arrival in Dublin, the lord deputy is said to have released the young peasant immediately.
The Commentators
The O’Clery family (Uí Cléirigh) were hereditary historians to the O’Donnell chieftains of Donegal from the fourteenth to the early seventeenth century.
Lughaidh Ó Cléirigh, born c.1580, a contemporary of Red Hugh O’Donnell, was the last to perform the function. His cousin, Mícheál was chief of the Four Masters (See Chapter 7) and Lughaidh himself is often thought, wrongly, to have been one of the famous annalists. However, the entire text of his Beatha Aodha Ruaidh Uí Dhomhnaill, the Life of Red Hugh O’Donnell, was incorporated into the Annals as an account of the Nine Years’ War. Lughaidh, a poet, was an instigator of the notorious war of words between the northern and the southern poets, Iomarbhágh na bhFileadh, the Contention of the Bards.
Philip O’Sullivan Beare was born c.1590 in west Cork. A nephew of Donal Cam O’Sullivan, chieftain of Beare, he was sent to Spain while still a child as a pledge to Philip III in return for aid to the O’Sullivans. He went on to have a career in the Spanish Navy and to become a writer and ‘historian’.
His best known work is Historiae Catholicae Iberniae Compendium, (Irish Catholic History), written in Latin and published in 1621. It includes an account of Red Hugh O’Donnell’s capture and escape.
A passionate exile, ‘Don Philippo’ (as the Spaniards called him) wore his heart on his sleeve and it dripped constantly on to the page. He couldn’t resist making a good story better – which is a virtue in a novelist, a flaw in a historian.
Rathmullan, a holiday destination, enjoys a liberal reputation today, catering for Donegal and Derry. Licensing laws are still flexible. Other dramatic events have been witnessed there, including the ‘Flight of the Earls’, when Hugh O’Neill and other Gaelic leaders abandoned Ulster to go into exile in 1607.
During the First World War, large sections of the British fleet were anchored in Lough Swilly, and Admiral Jellicoe had a long-term suite in Rathmullan Hotel, close to the point where the Matthew anchored over three hundred years before.
PRISON
So began O’Donnell’s first dramatic journey – probably with violence; surely with embarrassment; more than likely with a hangover. The Matthew sailed north to Malin Head, east along the Antrim coast, through Rathlin Sound and south by Belfast Lough, past the Mournes and Dundalk Bay, past the mouth of the Boyne, further south to Howth and finally into Dublin Bay. The capture of Red Hugh had been such a success that there was some unofficial talk of kidnapping others by similar means and of possibly locking up his parents when they visited Dublin at a later date. Recorded in state papers, these schemes create an image of the Irish wallowing like slugs in beer-traps.
The prison cells of Dublin Castle reeked of affliction in the time of Red Hugh, when there are reported to have been twenty hostages, three priests and a bishop held. In the words of Ó Cléirigh, written with a lump in
his ink, they passed the days and nights ‘lamenting the insufferable hardships and relating the great cruelty that was inflicted on them ….’ Confinement within the walls of an alien capital can only have been bitter for Red Hugh, an impetuous youth with the Atlantic in his nostrils. But there were plenty of O’Donnells pleased to see him banged up and out of competition for the title. In his absence, his mother buttressed her husband’s waning power. Thanks to her, several of Red Hugh’s rivals passed away violently.
For the first three and a quarter years of his captivity (September 1587–January 1591), the prisoner was kept in a tower flanking the main entrance to the Castle – not the Bermingham Tower, as frequently claimed. He was held in one of the twin towers of the Main Gate, and the details of the breakout confirm this. Today, the elegant Bedford Tower stands on top of that original prison block, which has disappeared into Castle Hall. His quarters overlooked the portcullis and drawbridge. For external company, he had the heads of executed prisoners extended on poles, in honour of which these famous lines were written by Richard Stanyhurst:
Those trunkless heads do plainly show each rebel’s fatal end
And what a heinous crime it is, the Queen for to offend.
The details of the gate-tower with its fringe of skulls are clearly visible in an illustration by John Derricke, done in 1581, showing the lord deputy of the time riding out of Dublin Castle. O’Donnell’s first breakout a decade later could have been masterminded using only this drawing. It is often cropped in print, but the full illustration shows the lower windows of the twin gate-towers as narrow slits, with a larger window on the upper floor, overlooking the drawbridge. It can only have been through this window, or the hidden one in the left-hand tower, that Red Hugh and a number of his companions escaped for the first time at the end of winter 1591.
Ropework
With a very long rope, téittrefedh rofhoda, they lowered themselves down to the drawbridge and blockaded the Castle door from the outside with a balk of timber wedged through its external ring. Ó CLÉIRIGH INTHE‘LIFE’
People are forever swarming up and down ropes in books, but it’s not that easy, in fact. To descend a rope, hand over hand, is a precarious business – especially the initial moves where the rope is running over the edge of a windowsill, pinning the fingers against the stone. The sailor’s trick of trapping the rope between the feet is plausible enough with a thick nautical rope, hawser-laid. However, such a rope is unlikely to have been smuggled in to the prisoners or concealed within. If a thick rope had been hauled up on a string from the drawbridge, as some have imagined, there would be no reason for the ‘Life’ to conceal the fact. The idea of a thick rope is contradicted by the word Ó Cléirigh uses, suainemhnaibh, which, although it can mean a rope, is more likely to refer to a thin cord.
One way to descend a slender rope or cord is to tie big knots in it for handholds, or even loops for the hands and feet, although that would use up an enormous amount of rope. John O’Donovan, translating an account of the escape from the Annals of the Four Masters, favours the notion of loops in the rope. References from documents of the day mention a type of silk called ‘sarsnet’, from which a line could be made.
There is one other way to descend a slender rope and that is by means of a classic abseil: passing the rope backwards between the legs, up around the hip, diagonally across the chest, over the shoulder and down across the back to wrap around the wrist where it is released slowly for maximum friction. This was a traditional method of descent practised by climbers, rarely used now, for reasons of safety and comfort. Rope-burns were common. Inexpertly used, it added a transverse cleavage to the buttocks.
The escape is said to have occurred early in the night. It is hard to imagine that a line of men scuttling down a rope on the front wall of the Castle would not have been spotted and the alarm raised, since the drawbridge was faced by a street and a row of houses. The fact that the guard on the Castle Gate was absent and that the prisoners had a rope means that money was involved. Contemporary papers reveal the constant bribery of officials by Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, and also the offer of very large sums by O’Donnell’s parents. Red Hugh’s father handed over a group of shipwrecked sailors from the Spanish Armada in an attempt to prise the hostage loose. The Spaniards were hanged by the lord deputy.
Several prisoners escaped with O’Donnell. They are assumed to have been the other victims of the Rathmullan kidnap. Historical fiction, in need of colour on a winter’s night, has made great play of Dónal Gorm’s blue eyes and O’Donnell’s red hair. The escape was an organised conspiracy, not a random breakout. According to the ‘Life’, there was a young man waiting with a pair of swords, one of which Red Hugh handed to Art Kavanagh to cover the rear. Kavanagh was a member of a famous fighting family, drafted in for the purpose. The road to the south was guarded by St Nicholas’ Gate, which had a double-tower and portcullis. It was open and the fugitives slipped through.
They were on their way to Glenmalure, in present-day Wicklow, mountain stronghold of Fiach MacHugh O’Byrne, who continued to defy the Crown despite his proximity to Dublin. O’Byrne had the status of a guerrilla chieftain, and his area was a haven for rebels and fugitives.
Although Glenmalure itself was nearly thirty miles (fifty kilometres) away, the security of the foothills lay within a couple of hours’ reach. Beyond the walls of the city, the fugitives leaped over ditches, gardens and walls, avoiding the roads. Ó Cléirigh indulges in a gleeful flashback, relishing the scene after the fugitives have fled, as if he had witnessed it himself. Discovering the escape, the guards rushed to the castle-door where they were blocked by the wooden crosspiece in the chain. They roused the people in the houses opposite the gate. The timber was removed, and a great crowd surged in pursuit.
FUGITIVES
The escape was to be no more than a painful rehearsal. Ó Cléirigh says that they headed for the mountain slope lying directly south. ‘The mountain is long and very wide,’ he adds. The route-description is equally succinct: ‘travelling all night, they crossed the red mountain.’ If modern guidebooks took the hint, they might restore the adventure to walking.
Sliabh Ruadh, the Red Mountain, traditionally meant the Dublin and Wicklow mountains lumped together. Events indicate that the fugitives were probably on the eastern (seaward) slopes of the hills. The guide would have avoided roadblocks on the lower routes where horsemen were already stumbling and cursing southwards. It is too easy to assume that the people of the hillsides would automatically assist the escape. What allegiance did a Leinster peasant owe to a fugitive aristocrat from Donegal?
There is a local tradition that O’Donnell crossed Three Rock Mountain during both of his escapes, and that this mountain, overlooking south Dublin, was actually Sliabh Rua. The repetition of the rumour down the centuries has fed back into the tradition itself and reinforced it. While the summit of Three Rock is most unlikely, it is reasonable to speculate that the fugitives were led through that general area – over the plateau formed by Three Rock, Killakee and Prince William’s Seat, and into either the Glencullen or the Glencree valley towards Enniskerry. One thing is certain: the teenaged Red Hugh would not have had the faintest notion of where he was from the moment he plunged into the wet darkness beyond Dublin.
Most commentators, however, have opted for a romantic passage straight and true among the high mountains, via Lough Bray and the Sally Gap towards Glendalough.2 This is the line of the Military Road across the upland bogs. That road would not be built, however, until Red Hugh was dead and buried for a couple of centuries. The grazing tracks that preceded parts of it across the blanket bogs would have been a highly improbable route to have taken on a black winter’s night of driving rain in January 1591 – especially for a group weakened by years in Dublin Castle.
The blankness of a mountain bog in winter darkness has to be experienced to be understood. The kind of foul weather that might conceal an escape from Dublin Castle is the very weather that would make a n
ight traverse via Lough Bray and the Sally Gap impossible, centuries before any road existed. An influential account, written by Standish O’Grady in 1897, has the guide crouching at times to examine the ground for his whereabouts; at other points, he takes his bearings from the faint outline of the hills, or from the roar of rushing torrents. This romantic notion was inspired by the literature of Indian trackers that had become popular in frontier America at the time. Art Kavanagh, presumed to be the guide, picks his way unerringly through the night ‘by the west side of Luggala, by Lough Dan and over the spurs of Mullaghcleevaun and Tonelagee ….’
It is unlikely that the writer of such a claim ever floundered in an upland bog on a winter’s night. Without moon or stars. Without map, compass, raincoat, torch or hot soup. Without the faintest trace of a road, the beam of a headlight, or the glow of a village on the underbelly of a cloud. Visibility in such conditions is nil. Surely, after the hurdle of the first plateau was crossed, the fugitives were lower down, on the eastern slopes of the hills, and not among the upper ridges and bogs at all.
Fit walkers who know where they are going travel at a comfortable average of three miles (five kilometres) per hour, and can maintain that speed over long distances. Speed decreases on uphill sections, where the rule of thumb adds to the flat time an extra one minute per ten metres of height gained. Fugitives move faster, of course, but it might be in short bursts, and it is hard to keep it up as an average – especially in winter darkness, virtually barefoot, on rugged terrain.
Endurance Page 2