Endurance

by Dermot Somers

  De Cuéllar had been spared a second shipwreck (if not more), but now he was alone again and lost somewhere in south Donegal. Strangely, the O’Donnells – chieftains of the region, with their main castle in Donegal town – are not mentioned. De Cuéllar might easily have gone to them. He could not have known it, but they were to deal less than honourably with a number of Spaniards who came into their control. They attempted to trade them with the authorities in Dublin for the release of Red Hugh O’Donnell. The Spaniards were accepted by the English and promptly executed in Dublin Castle. Red Hugh was not released.

  MACCLANCY’S CASTLE

  On the road, de Cuéllar met a priest in lay clothing, who spoke with him in Latin. The priest fed him and directed him to the castle of another chieftain, a day’s march away to the southeast. This was the home of Tadhg MacClancy, a chief subject to O’Rourke. MacClancy’s castle at Rosclogher was built on a fortified crannóg, or artificial island, about a hundred metres off the south shore of Lough Melvin. The castle, ruined now though the crannóg and foundations are still dramatically visible, is close to the present-day village of Kinlough.

  TO HELL AND BACK

  Before he could reach this sanctuary, de Cuéllar was kidnapped by a blacksmith living in some isolated place with an old witch he kept for a wife, una maldita bieja que tenía por muger. In fear of his life, the Spaniard was forced to work the bellows for more than a week, smiling pleasantly all the while to appease his captors. In a sense, this reads like a symbolic dream of purgatory or of hell, brought to a halt when the disguised priest arrived on the scene by chance and sent some of MacClancy’s men to rescue him. When de Cuéllar reached the chieftain’s settlement at Rosclogher, on the lakeshore, he was still dressed in straw. There were eight or ten Spaniards already there. Indeed, one had already assisted in his liberation from the forge. A note of quivering pathos is struck on his arrival at MacClancy’s castle: ‘His women even wept to see how badly I had been treated.’

  De Cuéllar’s troubles seemed over at last. Dressed in an Irish cloak, he became very friendly with the ladies, including MacClancy’s wife, and they treated him well. He was to spend three months with them, becoming as savage as themselves, hecho propio salbaje como ellos, in a nice variation on the cliché of the stranger who becomes more Irish than the Irish themselves. Obviously a cheerful fellow, he developed a reputation as a fortune teller and palm-reader, ‘telling them a great deal of nonsense’. He was in great demand, and he reflected that his troubles must be over since he could hardly fall much lower than to be a gypsy among savages. He became so popular among the women that MacClancy himself had to give orders that his guest was not to be pestered any further.

  The Irish

  De Cuéllar switched his attention from his own adventures to describe the local Irish in a famous passage that defies compression:

  They live in thatched cabins and are all big men, handsome and well-built, and swift as the red deer. They eat only once a day, and this has to be at night, and what they normally eat is butter and oaten bread. They drink buttermilk, for they have no other drink. And they don’t drink water, though it’s the best in the world. On feast-days they eat some kind of half-cooked meat, with neither bread nor salt, for that is their custom. They dress accordingly, in tight hose and short loose coats of very coarse goat’s hair. They wrap up in blankets and wear their hair down to their eyes. They are great travellers and they are inured to hardship; they are continually at war with the English garrisoned there by the Queen. Against these they defend themselves and don’t let them into their lands, which are all flooded and marshy: the whole area is more than forty leagues long and wide.

  What these people are most inclined to is thieving and robbing one another; so that not a day passes among them without a call-to-arms, because as soon as the people in the next village find out that in this one there are cattle or anything else, they come armed at night and all hell breaks loose and they slaughter one another. And as soon as the English from the garrisons find out who has rounded up and stolen the most cattle, they are sent in to seize them. All that these people can do is to retreat into the mountains with their women and herds, for they have no other property, furniture or clothes. They sleep on the floor, on freshly-cut rushes, full of water and ice. Most of the women are very beautiful, but badly turned out: they wear no more than a shift, and a shawl that they wrap round themselves, and a piece of linen on their heads which is folded several times and knotted at the forehead. They work hard, and are good housekeepers, in their own way ….

  TRANS: GALLAGHER & CRUICKSHANK, GOD’S OBVIOUS DESIGN

  FITZWILLIAM MARCHEs WEST

  Meanwhile, Sir William Fitzwilliam, Lord Deputy of Ireland, was marching hastily westwards from Dublin, to suppress whatever threat the Spaniards might pose. On his orders, survivors were being exterminated, except for those isolated groups protected by MacClancy, O’Rourke, O’Neill, Sorley Boy MacDonnell, and a few other chieftains. And, of course, the fifteen hundred men de Leyva had assembled in Donegal, two hundred of whom had to be left behind by the Girona, while the rest sailed to their doom.

  As the English army drew close to Rosclogher Castle, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake, MacClancy decided to withdraw for safety into the hills with his people and his cattle. He was in a towering rage, his hair down round his eyes in the Irish fringe, the glib. De Cuéllar advised him to calm down a bit while the Spaniards consulted among themselves. The former ship’s captain gave his countrymen a gallant speech. They should make a stand, he said, and refuse to run any further. He argued that they should occupy the castle by themselves – all nine of them – and defend it against the English army, which he believed to number about seventeen hundred men. His strategy was based on the impregnability of MacClancy’s island castle and on the difficulty of the terrain surrounding the lake. Neither claim was strictly true, and artillery would have toppled his case overnight.

  SIEGE AT MACCLANCY’s CASTLE

  MacClancy stocked the castle with small arms and supplies, including several boatloads of stones. There is no mention among the weapons of a pedrero, a gun to fire the stones, so they might have been meant for throwing if things got really bad. Finally, de Cuéllar swore an oath to MacClancy that he would not abandon Rosclogher, or hand it over to the enemy under any circumstances, even if he were dying of hunger. In exacting this oath, MacClancy seems to have anticipated the kind of betrayals that would occur in Munster a dozen years later, after the Battle of Kinsale, when certain Spanish commanders were quick to negotiate with the enemy.

  Engagingly brash, de Cuéllar boasts that their courage was admired all over the territory. Not by the English, however. When Fitzwilliam’s forces drew up at Rosfriar point, a kilometre away from the castle, they hanged two Spaniards on the lakeshore. The noose was winking at de Cuéllar again. In the face of threats and offers, he refused to yield. His men went so far as to give cheek to the English from the castle walls, claiming that they could not hear the threats.

  Fitzwilliam’s men besieged Rosclogher for seventeen days, until winter closed in with gales and blizzards and sent the army packing, all the way back to Dublin. MacClancy returned and greeted the Spaniards as heroes. He offered his sister in marriage to de Cuéllar, who declined. He gives no opinion as to her appearance, which is not a good sign. Earlier, he had remarked that MacClancy’s own wife was extremely beautiful and he may have been unwilling to accept less. But all he asked, according to himself, was a guide to take him to a place where he might find a boat going north. (King James of Scotland was friendly to Spain.) His request was not granted and he realised that he was a prisoner rather than a guest. MacClancy meant to keep the Spaniards as a line of defence. In fact, this policy was widespread among Irish chieftains in the north, several of whom saw the Spaniards as a kind of military currency for settling local scores among themselves – a role the castaways were unwilling to perform. A couple of hours before dawn, on 4 January 1589, de Cuéllar and fou
r others quit the castle on Lough Melvin and took to the road again.

  The Fate of MacClancy and O’Rourke

  What de Cuéllar in his boyish pride could not know was that within a couple of years, both of the savage chieftains he admired for their hostility to the Lutheran Queen – Brian O’Rourke and Tadhg MacClancy – would be dead in brutal circumstances. MacClancy, trapped by the soldiers of the murderous Sir George Bingham, plunged into the lake and tried to swim to Rosclogher Castle. A shot broke his arm. Dragged ashore, he was killed and beheaded. A comment in State Papers of 23 April 1590, concludes: ‘He was the most barbarous creature in Ireland ….’ The remark could have been applied more aptly to George Bingham himself, or to his brother Richard, provincial president of Connacht. In the same year, Brian O’Rourke of Breifne fled to Scotland. He was arrested and brought to London where he was hanged.

  ACROSS ULSTER TO NORTH ANTRIM

  De Cuéllar travelled for twenty days, traversing Ulster in January to reach the north of Co. Antrim. Known as ‘the Route’, this was the territory of Sorley Boy MacDonnell, a chieftain of Scottish extraction who maintained an ambiguous relationship with the English authorities. Sorley Boy (buí: yellow or fair-haired) had already salvaged guns from the wrecked Girona and had helped Spanish survivors to reach Scotland.

  De Cuéllar’s journey cross-country had taken him ‘through mountains and deserted places, with great hardship’, meaning that he avoided contact with people as much as possible, for fear of capture or betrayal. In the middle of winter, in one of the worst periods of weather in recent Irish history, food must have been very difficult to come by. The journey took him through the lands of the various O’Neills, and past the territory of Ó Catháin, el Ocán, a vassal-chieftain of the O’Neills. On the north Antrim coast, de Cuéllar was devastated by the evidence of the Girona shipwreck. This great galleon would have been a symbol of Spanish invincibility and pride. Everywhere he went, people told him harrowing tales and showed him Spanish valuables. Spain must have seemed sadly diminished and very far away. There were no boats at all bound for Scotland, so he limped painfully back along the north Antrim coast to the territory of Ó Catháin (east of Lough Foyle), to discover that he had missed a sailing and that Ó Catháin was having nothing further to do with Spaniards. He had already exerted himself on their behalf and now there were English soldiers everywhere.

  His leg-wound, which must have involved a recurrent infection, felled de Cuéllar again in a dangerous military area, but he was rescued by some women who hid him in their cabins on the mountain for six weeks, until the wound had healed. Unfortunately, he tells us nothing about the people who performed such an extraordinary service.

  There were beautiful girls in the next episode, however, in the thatched cabins of a village where soldiers were usually billeted. De Cuéllar’s Irish must have been improving. While the military were away on an engagement, he became friendly with the girls, visiting them for company and conversation. It is a safe bet that he resorted to palm-reading and fortune telling again. Two soldiers captured him in the house and began to make arrangements for his transport to prison in Dublin. Thinking that he was incapacitated and quite willing to be taken, the soldiers began to romp with the girls, retocar con las mocas. Their mother tipped de Cuéllar the wink and he slipped out the door and away.

  LOUGH FOYLE

  He found shelter with a family of rebels on a hill overlooking Lough Foyle. A boy went back to the village after a day or two and found the soldiers still rushing around in a rage, looking for de Cuéllar. He was soon on his way to the home of another potential patron. The man in question is understood to have been Redmond Gallagher, Bishop of Derry, although de Cuéllar leaves his identity vague. ‘This bishop was a very good Christian; he went about dressed as a savage so as to pass unnoticed.’ But he knew he had reached sanctuary at last and he could not restrain his tears at the encounter. It seems that the bishop was also pleased – especially when he learned that de Cuéllar was a captain, no less. A week later, the Spaniard was on a vessel travelling north. It was ‘a miserable little boat with eighteen people on board.’

  Bloodbath at Lough Foyle

  A savage massacre of Spanish castaways had taken place near Lough Foyle after the Trinidad Valencera was wrecked in Kinnagoe Bay. Five hundred survivors, marching through the countryside, surrendered to an English force commanded by Major Kelly, obviously an Irishman. The Spanish officers were separated out, to be held for ransom, while their unarmed men were shot down in cold blood in front of their horrified eyes. According to witnesses, three hundred Spaniards were killed on the orders of Major Kelly and the notorious Hovenden brothers, two captains distinguished in Spanish reports by their long, white beards.

  Conor O’Devany, Bishop of Down and Connor, took in one hundred and fifty survivors of this massacre. The wounded were taken by Ó Catháin who cared for them until he managed to transfer them to Sorley Boy MacDonnell, chieftain of north Antrim, who succeeded finally in shipping them to Scotland.

  BOUND FOR SCOTLAND

  The weather promptly turned bad, a reminder yet again that while de Cuéllar was fortunate in the broad sense of survival, he was very unlucky in the detail. The boat was hurled as far as the Hebrides, although de Cuéllar thought they were the Shetlands. Interestingly, he had also thought that the Mayo coast was Cape Clear in Co. Cork. It took three leaky, swilling days for the boat to fight its way back around the coast of Scotland to its homeport.

  The arrival was euphoric, because King James was known to have welcomed survivors of the Armada to Scotland already. By all reports, he had fed and clothed them and paid for their passage home. Sadly, de Cuéllar found ‘the opposite was true, for he didn’t look after any of them, and not a penny did he give in alms, though the six hundred of us Spaniards who came to that kingdom suffered the direst privations.’ The Spaniards waited six miserable months in Scotland, in constant fear of being handed over to the English by James; porque el rey de Escocia no es nada… ‘for the king of Scotland is nothing … and he doesn’t take a step or eat a scrap except by order of the Queen.’

  According to de Cuéllar, it was the constant intervention of Catholic nobles on their behalf that eventually delivered the Spaniards from the Lutheran heretics in the population. In his opinion, the Scottish Catholics prayed constantly that King Philip of Spain would take over their country, ‘to restore God’s Church’. Of course, there were Irish too who harboured the same hope for their own country

  TO FLANDERS

  At last, the Duke of Parma negotiated the repatriation of the refugees from Scotland to Flanders in northern Europe, with safe passage through the North Sea promised by the English. The men were transported on four ships by a Scottish merchant who was paid a rate of five ducats per head (when a labourer’s wage was two ducats a month.) The ships were ambushed near Dunkirk by the Dutch fleet – with the connivance of the English, in de Cuéllar’s bitter opinion. Two hundred and seventy Spaniards – in two ships – were captured by the Dutch, while the other two vessels ran aground under heavy fire. Hundreds of men were forced to take to the water on planks. De Cuéllar came ashore in Flanders, almost naked again, and in a wretched state. The Dutch, in full sight of the survivors, slaughtered the two hundred and seventy Spaniards they had captured.

  De Cuéllar’s letter closed with the information that the Spanish had since turned the tables and had beheaded more than four hundred Dutchmen. On a note of grim satisfaction, he concluded: ‘This is what I wanted to write to you about. From the city of Antwerp, 4th October 1589.’

  De Cuéllar is widely believed to have survived and returned to Spain, although no definite evidence has yet appeared.

  3 THE HUNGRY ROAD

  March of O’Sullivan Beare (1602–3)

  After a surge of success, the rebellion known as the Nine Years’ War had collapsed in disaster for the Irish, at the Battle of Kinsale, 1601.

  A year later, the country was on the verge of famine; racked by
defections, reprisals and dispossession. Hugh O’Neill, leader of the rebels, had retreated to Ulster, where he was reported to be still at war. Red Hugh O’Donnell, seeking further aid, had dashed off to Spain where he died in ugly circumstances. Isolated rebels still held out in their own areas. Among these were O’Rourke in Co. Leitrim and O’Sullivan Beare in west Cork.

  DONAL CAM

  Donal O’Sullivan, chieftain of Beare and Bantry, was reduced to a small force of guerrillas and the herds on which they depended for survival. Groups of mercenaries had abandoned him already in the face of disaster. Under relentless pursuit by the English, he was cornered in the oak woods of Glengarriff. His territory had shrunk to a few rocky hills and boggy valleys, from which he was soon to be dislodged.

  Forty years old, O’Sullivan had gained the nickname Donal Cam, meaning crooked, possibly from a shoulder injury. In an existing portrait, his head is cradled in the ridiculous ruff of the time. He looks refined, almost effete, with sharp features and a cats-whisker moustache. A man of action, he is shown holding weapons in both hands.