LISTEN AGAIN
To listen to Melvyn Bragg discuss the
Plantation of Ireland with experts including
Hiram Morgan, go to bbc.co.uk/
programmes/p00q4y8rDISCOVER MOREHiram Morgan teaches history at University
College Cork. He is author of Ty r o n e ’s R e b e l l i o n :
The Outbreak of the Nine Years War in Tudor
Ireland (Royal Historical Society, 1993)This remarkable rhetoric turned the
language of English colonialism on its head.
O’Neill followed up the proclamation with
22 articles that would have converted Ireland
into a self-governing Catholic country under
nominal English sovereignty. Sir Robert
Cecil, Elizabeth’s secretary of state, seeing
the proposal on its arrival in London,
dismissed it as fanciful with a single
word: “Ewtopia”.
Crucially, O’Neill’s exhortation failed
to convince Ireland’s English-speaking
townsmen, who suspected that he was
masking an ambition for kingship with
a feigned concern for their immortal souls.
When they rejected his overtures, he pleaded
unsuccessfully with Rome to excommuni-
cate them. Pope Clement VIII did, though,
appoint him ‘Captain-General of the
Catholic Army in Ireland’.Too little, too late
The tide was turning. Essex’s replacement,
the more capable Baron Mountjoy, at last
brought England’s superior resources to
bear. O’Neill’s only hope of realising his
ambitions now appeared to be the landing
of a Spanish Armada in Ireland. Mountjoy
fought a year-round war, using scorched-
earth tactics to devastate O’Neill’s agricul-
tural base. Then the long-awaited expedition
to Derry finally landed, snatching much of
Tyrone and Tirconnell out of the grasp of
their lords.
As a result, when Spain did finally
commit forces to Ireland, it proved too little,
too late. The Spanish landed at Kinsale andThe war dragged on for another 15
months, until O’Neill finally surrendered to
Mountjoy at Mellifont in 1603, unaware that
Elizabeth was already a week dead. His long
campaign to oust the English from Ireland
was over – a remarkable but ultimately
doomed endeavour.
For all O’Neill’s brilliance, the Nine Years’
War ended with Ireland completely under
English rule for the first time in its history.
Though pardoned at Mellifont, O’Neill was
unable to bear the humiliation of English
power and the imposition of Protestantism.
In 1607, he and the other Ulster lords
departed Ireland in the so-called Flight of
the Earls. Neither Elizabeth’s successor,
James VI and I, nor the Spanish, now at peace
with England, had any need of O’Neill, and
he died an impoverished exile in Rome.
Like Shakespeare and Cervantes, O’Neill
breathed his last in 1616. And though those
two writers claimed the lion’s share of public
adulation in 2016, there’s a strong argument
to be made that, in his own day, O’Neill was
far more important.This propaganda woodcut
shows O’Neill submitting to the
English in 1603. Four years later,
a disenchanted O’Neill quit
Ireland in the so-called Flight
of the Earls. He never returnedGETTY^ IMAGES/BRIDGEMANCharles Blount, 8th Baron Mountjoy, used
a scorched-earth policy to fight O’NeillAt the end of
the Nine Years’
War, Ireland was
completely under
English rule for the
first time ever
Castlehaven in County Cork, which the
English had retaken, so O’Neill and
O’Donnell had to march the length of the
country to join forces with them. When
the two sides met in battle at Kinsale on
Christmas Eve 1601, the Irish were beaten.
It was a decisive blow to O’Neill. “Today
this kingdom is lost,” he declared.Elizabethans and the world / Irish rebellion