Kingdom Overthrown E-Book

Gerard Fitzgibbon

• Herausgeber: New Island
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Seventeenth-century Europe was a theatre of almost endless rivalry and destruction, where wars of religion and dynastic succession wreaked havoc across the continent. Kingdom Overthrown: The Battle for Ireland, 1688-1691 tells the story of the Williamite War, in which Ireland became the unexpected stage for a truly European struggle. To the Irish officers who served in both armies it was a fight for control of land, property and influence. It was also part of a pan-European war that would have far-reaching consequences: it saw the last ever confrontation on a battlefield between two claimants to the English throne, William of Orange and King James II, and it featured many intense and gruesome clashes, including the Siege of Derry and the battles of Aughrim and the Boyne. Driven by first-hand accounts of soldiers and officers in both armies, collected from historical manuscript collections, correspondence and personal memoirs, Kingdom Overthrown presents an accurate, and above all human, account of one of the most destructive conflicts ever fought on the island of Ireland.

Leseprobe

Kingdom Overthrown

Kingdom Overthrown

Ireland and the Battle for Europe, 1688–1691

Gerard Fitzgibbon

KINGDOM OVERTHROWN

First published in 2015 by New Island Books 16 Priory Hall Office Park Stillorgan County Dublin Republic of Ireland.

www.newisland.ie

Copyright © Gerard Fitzgibbon, 2015

PRINT ISBN:  978-1-84840-475-5 EPUB ISBN:  978-1-84840-476-2 MOBI ISBN:  978-1-84840-477-9

All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owner.

British Library Cataloguing Data. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Contents

Introduction

Acknowledgements

Part One: Legacy

1. Pieces of Paper

2. Predatory Incursion

3. Avalanche

4. Oliver’s Shoemakers

5. Forever Incapable

6. Jacobus Rex

7. All Prudent Courses

8. Nineteen Parts of Twenty

9. Invasion

Part Two: Revolution

10. Villainy upon Villainy

11. Nothing Less than Despair

12. House of Fear

13. We Shall Never See Each Other Again

14. Now or Never, Now and Forever

15. To Derry

16. No Surrender

17. Cruel Consistency

18. Dividing the Skin

19. This, I Hope, Will be Your Destiny

20. Outlive the Day

Part Three: War

21. A Noisy World

22. Fishing with a Golden Hook

23. The Boyne

24. They Gave the Kingdom for Lost

25. Sarsfield’s Pyre

26. Thirty Paces Wide

27. Army of One

28. Hell upon Earth

29. God Will Make You All Saints

30. Aughrim

31. A Mighty Edifice

32. Before God and the World

33. Articles

Epilogue: Time and Violence

Bibliography

Endnotes

Index

For Mum and Dad,

and Martha

Introduction

I was born in England to Irish parents. When I was a boy my father gave me an old storybook of Greek legends, which told me of the feats of Perseus, Hercules, Odysseus and Jason. The idea that bizarre and marvellous things might live in the past was what first kindled my love of history. When I went to secondary school in Ilford, I learned about the industrial revolution and the Great War and Britain’s firm, proud strides into the twentieth century. Then, in 1998, my family moved to Ireland. Sitting in a new school and opening a new textbook, I found a strange story staring back at me. History, I was now told, actually began with Parnell, the Home Rule movement, and Ireland’s final fight for independence. England was no longer a proud old dame, but a tyrant. I read and listened, but it took a while to fully understand. Every nation teaches its children the story of how it won. It follows, therefore, that defeats and humiliations are tucked away. Most Irish men and women of my generation can speak comfortably about Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera. Ask them about Richard Talbot or James II, however, and many will shrug. This is not criticism; it is simply what we were all taught.

In the six years that I spent working as a journalist at an Irish regional newspaper, I always sought the human within every story. The world is built on numbers and stone, but people built it. When I look at a four-hundred-year-old wall, I think of the man who laid the bricks. When I read about Ulysses Grant or Simon Bolivar or Edward IV, I picture them as men, tapping their fingers and struggling with the weight of a cause. It helps to remember that history always begins as dirt, blood and water. Only time and teaching turn it into ink. In Ireland, this ancient and beautiful old rock, history is all around us. It is up to us whether or not we choose to see it.

This book is a narrative account of what we now call the Williamite War in Ireland. It is told as a story, not a succession of inevitable events and conclusions. The war and the constitutional crisis that spawned it was a violent, dramatic, and visceral time, and much of it spun on luck. The conflict meant something different to everyone it swallowed: to James Stuart, it was a fight to regain his kingdoms. For William of Orange and Louis XIV of France, it was a new frontier in a great European brawl. To the gentry and noblemen who took commissions and raised regiments, it was a battle for Ireland’s land, and the wealth and prestige that flowed from it. For the common folk of Ireland, Protestant and Catholic alike, it was a war for the right of their king to secure their religion. The tale of passion, tragedy and heroism that these men and women shared does not deserve to be told in black, white or grey.

This book exists because I, like so many of my generation, was vaguely aware that this war took place but had little sense of its breathtaking scale, cost and consequences. In school we are not taught that it was the only continental war ever fought in Ireland, or that in the Battle of Aughrim it witnessed the bloodiest single day in Irish history. We walk through the streets of Pennywell in Limerick, but never think of the titanic hand-to-hand struggle that took place under our feet. We stand on the old walls of Derry and look out at the proud city that has grown around them, but we cannot see the wretched forest of tents and corpses that once clogged the horizon. The story of this war has been reduced to anecdotes and folded away. I believe it is time to bring it back to life.

It is necessary to clarify a few things before this story begins. All dates in this book are taken from the old Julian calendar, which was still in use in England and Ireland at the time, not the modern Gregorian calendar, which exists today. There is roughly an eleven-day lag between the two, but I have kept to the old style simply because these were the dates used by every diarist, printer and clerk. Distances and measurements are likewise given in the old imperial format of miles, yards and inches. There is also some prickly housekeeping to be addressed. Whether the great citadel of Ulster is named Londonderry or Derry can split opinion like a pickaxe. I have sought to tread water by referring to the county by the former name, and the city by the latter. I accept that this is a crude compromise that may offend someone, or everyone, but that is the risk I must take.

My generation has known more of peace than war. We are one of the few in human history able to say that. The Troubles of Northern Ireland, though not yet confined to memory, are slowly being left behind. There is distance enough now, perhaps, to read about the men who fought and died at Athlone and the Boyne without choking on the prejudices of the past. Little good comes from being bound by history, but it should not be ignored either. This book was not written to massage a particular point of view, or to challenge facts that already exist. Nor is it a biography of James II, William III, Richard Talbot or any other man. I have not sought to explore rumour, innuendo, sexuality or gossip. It is a book about people, mighty and poor alike, standing in muddy battlefields or draughty palaces, each finding themselves sucked into a great and furious moment. It is a human history.

Gerard Fitzgibbon Summer, 2015

Acknowledgements

This book would not exist were it not for the help, direct and otherwise, of so many people. Firstly, I would like to thank the team at New Island Books for bringing my idea to life, particularly Eoin Purcell for taking the project on and Dan Bolger for seeing it through. I owe much to my editor, Emma Dunne, for helping turn a squishy first draft into something more. Emma’s patience, insight and extraordinary eye for detail have been invaluable, and I am truly grateful that she was part of this journey.

I also wish to thank the teachers, lecturers and storytellers who kept me hooked on history throughout my life. There is the late Mr Farrar, history teacher at Ilford County High School, who once got us to re-enact the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in class, and encouraged us to use items from our pencil cases as improvised explosives. Then there is Professor Roger Sarty of Wilfried Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, who delivered the most memorable lecture I ever attended: a three-hour, grippingly detailed account of combined arms warfare in the Second World War, delivered without a single page of notes for reference. Closer to home, I wish to thank Dr Ruan O’Donnell of the University of Limerick for his frank and honest advice, and Dr Padraig Lenihan, formerly of UL and now of NUI Galway, who is one of the finest scholars of seventeenth-century-Ireland and provided me with valuable advice back when this book was just an idea.

I also wish to thank two men I have never met, but without whom I doubt this book would exist: the late J. G. Simms, whose work on Jacobite Ireland in the sixties and seventies is the keystone of every journal and book on the subject that followed; and Roger Crowley, author of Empires of the Sea, the finest narrative history book ever written and the one work that I will forever try and fail to emulate. I also wish to thank my old editor at the Limerick Leader, Alan English, who taught me the valuable lesson that sometimes a writer just needs to get out of the way.

I must thank my family for all their love, support and encouragement. My parents, Helen and Pat, my sisters Joanne, Julie and Jenny and my little niece Emma have done more for me than I will ever be able to repay. Finally, I owe the greatest debt to Martha, who lay awake with me every night, reading every page. Her praise was always honest, her criticism gentle, and her love undisguised. She is the reason this book is more than just a forgotten dream.

Part One

Legacy

‘This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England’.

William Shakespeare, Richard II, Act II, scene i.

1

Pieces of Paper

The fortress sat on the cliff like a crown of stone. Its walls seemed to rise up out of the earth like vines, tangling their way around the high keep that guarded the passage into south-east England. To the sailors and merchants who spent their days haggling and cursing in the port below, the sight of the great castle of Dover looming over them was nothing strange. But on the morning of 25 May 1660, a young prince standing on the deck of a great flagship offshore could barely take his eyes off it. Charles Stuart, the exiled heir to the throne, was a knot of excitement and nerves. He was tall and slender and bore the long bulbous nose of all royal inbreeding. With his dense dark hair, brown eyes and faintly sallow skin, he had more than just a little of his Medici grandmother in him. Charles was just a few days shy of his thirtieth birthday, but he had already known a lifetime’s worth of danger and ruin. Now, at last, his tide was sweeping in. Dressed in lavish silk finery finished with a cape of blue, crimson and gold, Charles climbed down into a small dinghy with his younger brothers, James and Henry, and was slowly rowed towards the shore. As the heaving crowd that had been gathering along the beach since dawn drew closer into view, the air suddenly cracked as the cannons of Dover castle fired a thunderous salute. The fortress was welcoming its new master.

When Charles finally reached the shore, he was swallowed in a wave of noise and adulation. Hardened soldiers fell at his feet and kissed his hands. An ‘infinite’ crowd of ‘horsemen, citizens and noblemen of all sorts’ thronged the streets of Dover, as if they had all refused to trust the pamphlets and proclamations and reckoned that the only way to believe that the king had finally returned would be to see him with their own eyes.1 Charles eventually climbed into a waiting carriage and was whisked away towards Canterbury. As he stared out into a sea of faces, he saw hope and relief in the eyes looking back at him. But there were wounds as well, hidden beneath the smiles and trumpets and civic gifts. The three kingdoms of England, Ireland and Scotland, which Charles had come to claim as his birthright now that Oliver Cromwell’s commonwealth had finally fallen to pieces, had been shredded by civil wars. Today at least, as he climbed ashore at Dover, Charles Stuart felt a fair wind at his back. But in these dark and changeable times few were brave enough to guess what weather lay ahead.

*

The letters started arriving immediately. At first, the correspondence piling up on the desks of the royal secretaries of Whitehall Palace was fairly standard – sailors looking for back pay, for example, or merchant seamen seeking protection from pirates. But very soon the petitions for favour, mercy and fortune began to flood through the door. In just the first weeks after Charles had arrived in London on 29 May 1660, his thirtieth birthday, the young man who had at last inherited his father’s throne received hundreds of letters from old allies seeking favour, peasants pleading for work and others who had fought for the Stuarts in the civil war and had lost everything because of it. The road back had been a long and tortuous path for Charles and his kingdoms, and it ended where it had all began: in Westminster, the beating heart of the realm.2

In April 1661, almost a year after his return at Dover, King Charles II was formally crowned in Westminster Abbey in a ceremony rich with pageantry, hymns and ancient oaths. The magnificent cathedral was crammed with dignitaries dressed in velvet and cloth-of-gold, while outside in the streets bonfires were lit, rivers of wine were poured and 10,000 people jostled for a glimpse of the king on whom so much now depended. The last of the formalities was over. Charles II now wore a crown that had been vacant since 1649 when his father, Charles I, was convicted of treason by parliament, marched on to a scaffold in Whitehall and beheaded. The new king had been groomed since childhood to one day ascend to the throne, and though the path he was forced to walk had been soiled by filth and gore, the young Charles trusted his footing. He had come to understand that the fate of the crown, and the course of history itself, was ultimately balanced on simple pieces of paper. Charles and his people had learned, and would learn again, that letters, charters and warrants could create and destroy so much.3

*

It started with the Plantagenets, the medieval line of kings that conquered Wales, snatched Ireland, fought wars with France out of ancient habit and ultimately tore itself to pieces in the Wars of the Roses. Magna Carta, the most famous document in English history, hatched an awkward bargain between the Plantagenets and their often-restless noblemen. It sought to restrict the king’s previously unchecked and God-given power through laws, in return for which the lords and barons of the realm would continue to collect taxes, raise armies and finance the crown’s cripplingly expensive wars. The king, in turn, was expected to sit and hear his subjects’ grievances in a convention that evolved into a parliament. Over time, the rulers and the ruled came to see one another as a murky burden. Hardly a single king reigned without tasting some flavour of revolt. When the crown’s reckoning finally arrived, it would not be clean or quiet.

In January 1642 Charles I, who had once gone eleven years without calling parliament and was labelled a tyrant by his enemies, barged into the House of Commons with 400 soldiers and demanded the arrest of several of its members for high treason. The commons refused to hand them over, and a bonfire of hate and suspicion that had been piling up across all three of the Stuart kingdoms finally ignited. Scotland had already risen in rebellion, as the Presbyterians of the north struck out to defend their faith against the controls of the crown’s established Protestant Church. In Ireland, some of the last maverick Catholic Gaels of Ulster had sparked an uprising against English settlers, which had since spilled out across the island in a spiral of atrocities. And now, at last, the rival supporters of the crown and parliament in England cracked open their armouries and began to march against each other. The next nine years would be a haunting era of cruelty and barbarism, as tens of thousands of people died from starvation, disease and battle across the British Isles. The war between Charles and the forces of parliament, led by Oliver Cromwell, was a brutal and lingering struggle. It ended with the historic execution of Charles in January 1649, which followed the passing of a law barely a few hours earlier ensuring that the throne would remain vacant after his death. The warrant for Charles’s execution – which infamously charged him as a ‘tyrant, a traitor, a murderer, and a public enemy’ – and the fifty-nine men who signed it, including Cromwell himself, would never be forgotten.

The crown became a ghostly relic. The executed king’s eldest son and heir, the teenage prince Charles, was forced into exile. In 1651, aged just twenty-one, Charles returned to England and led a doomed invasion to retake the crown from the north. After his army was routed on the battlefield, Charles was smuggled to safety in disguise and barely made it out of England alive. For the next decade he was a king without a country, keeping a small court on the continent and surviving on the patronage of benefactors like his cousin, the young King Louis XIV of France. But his thoughts were trapped in England, and Charles never stopped waiting for the day when fate’s hand would turn. His patience was eventually rewarded. After the execution of Charles I in 1649, Cromwell had invaded Ireland, dissolved parliament and ruled the three kingdoms as a military dictator under the title of lord protector. After his death in 1658, the realm began to slide once more into darkness. Cromwell’s son Richard briefly succeeded him as lord protector, but he had none of his father’s brutal authority and could not prevent power from slipping through his hands. The army withdrew their support for his regime, and rival blocs within the old parliament began to eye each other suspiciously. Another civil war gathered on the horizon like a tempest. Then, in December 1659, General George Monck, one of Cromwell’s old deputies and the commander of the army in Scotland, decided to step forward and seize the moment. He had seen the rape and pillage and murder of the civil war with his own eyes; he knew the history of the Wars of the Roses 200 years earlier, when rival branches of the Plantagenet tree tore England to shreds. Monck and his allies were terrified at the thought of another power vacuum. He gathered his men, marched south and on 3 February 1660 he arrived in London at the head of almost 6,000 troops. Monck seized control of the capital and cleared the way for Charles Stuart, the lost prince, to return at last.

Another historic piece of paper arrived from across the sea. Charles had been in secret correspondence with Monck for some time, and on 4 April he wrote an open letter to the people of his father’s kingdoms swearing his ‘desire and longing’ to finally end the darkness of the civil war and return the realm to peace. Charles’s famous ‘Declaration of Breda’ promised to pardon a great many people of a great many things – all except the regicides, the men who had signed his father’s death warrant. Charles would later have them hunted down one by one: some escaped to Europe or the Americas; others were already dead. The rest were captured and tried, and several suffered the traitor’s death of being hung, drawn and quartered. Cromwell’s rotting corpse was dug up and beheaded, and the lord protector’s skull was stuck on a spear outside Westminster Hall, where the trial of Charles I had taken place. The Declaration of Breda offered Monck, his soldiers and his supporters two key promises: that Charles would not interfere with ‘their lives, liberties or estates’ and that he would settle their unpaid wages. It was all they needed to hear. With the army now on his side, Charles was invited home. On 1 May 1660 the House of Commons met in London and proclaimed Charles as their king, and within a month he had climbed ashore at Dover, where the first person to greet him was General Monck, the relieved architect of a bloodless restoration.

*

As the spring of 1660 melted into summer, and the kingdoms were caught in a carnival of joy and relief, it would have seemed to many that one of the most terrible chapters in English, Irish and Scottish history was finally over. But trouble was only hiding in the shadows, biding its time. The Declaration of Breda was heavy on promises but light on detail, and soon Charles would have to come up with answers to many of the murky questions he inherited from Cromwell. One of the most volatile problems was land and deciding who now owned it all. Nowhere would this prove more dangerous than in Ireland, the great thorn in England’s side.

2

Predatory Incursion

Only one Englishman has ever been Bishop of Rome: a monk from Hertfordshire named Nicholas Breakspear, who was elected as Pope Adrian IV in 1154. Adrian was an administrator, and he liked a challenge. As a cardinal, he had been sent as papal legate into the wilds of Scandinavia, and as pope he remained determined to stretch out the church’s arms. Staring at a map of Europe, Adrian glanced towards his homeland and then, across a narrow slither of sea, at Ireland, one of the Vatican’s old headaches. Hard on the edge of the continent, Ireland was home to a Celtic brand of Christianity whose practices and habits did not sit well with Rome. Many priests did not practice chastity – the Archdeacon of Clogher, for example, claimed to have fathered eight children. To a distant eye, the Irish were seen as ‘wallowing in vice’, without a true church to guide them. It was foggy propaganda, but it was useful. In 1155 Adrian signed a papal bull which granted ownership of Ireland to Henry II, King of England and Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine. With a sharp knowledge of canon law, Adrian decided that Ireland was his prize to give because of an obscure 800-year-old document – revealed centuries later to be a forgery – in which Emperor Constantine apparently handed control of the western half of his empire, including all of the islands of Europe, to Rome. Hoping to inspire Henry II to become one of Christ’s champions, Adrian urged him to ‘enter into the island of Ireland in order to subject the people to the laws, and extirpate the vices that have there taken root’. Adrian also wished, conveniently, to levy an annual tax on the island of one penny per household, payable directly to the Vatican.1

Henry II, the first king of the Plantagenet dynasty, hailed from Anjou in the north-west of France, and he had grown up with a very French idea of kingship. He liked tough armies, thick walls and obedient vassals. He was energetic, broad-shouldered and had a devilish temper. But he also had a shrewd eye for opportunity, and when he finally decided to take up Rome’s invitation to claim Ireland in October 1171 – long after Pope Adrian himself had died – he did so because it suited the times. Henry was still privately terrified of God’s judgement after the scandalous murder of his best-friend-turned-bitter-enemy Thomas à Becket, the archbishop who was hacked to pieces in Canterbury Cathedral the previous year by four knights who thought they were doing the king a favour. Taking up a papal crusade was generally good for the soul, but there were other benefits. Invading Ireland would allow Henry to take care of another problem: in 1169 he had sponsored a band of Norman barons to travel to Ireland and forcibly restore the deposed king of Leinster, who had travelled to France and pleaded for Henry’s help. By 1171 these barons, led by the likes of the Earl of Pembroke, the famous ‘Strongbow’, had spread out across Ireland and become very powerful, very quickly. Celtic storytellers would long rue the ‘predatory incursion’ of these barons and mercenaries, who fought pitched battles, burned homes and churches, seized livestock and turned much of the island into ‘a trembling sod’. Lawlessness and murder was one thing, but Henry’s real concern was the risk that these barons would grow rich in Ireland, raise their own armies and come back to challenge him. Like all the Plantagenets who would follow him, Henry saw a potential enemy in every ally. He decided that it was time to put the barons back in their place.2

In October 1171 Henry landed in the southern Irish port of Waterford with a fleet of 400 ships and 4,000 men, including hundreds of thickly armed knights and ‘earls and barons of great worth’. The ‘rich and bold’ King of England arrived with an overwhelming show of colour and strength. As he marched to Cashel, Lismore and Dublin, Ireland’s native chieftains and the rowdy Norman barons had no choice but to come and pay homage to the great king, who now carried the self-appointed title of ‘lord of Ireland’. Henry began shuffling the country around to his liking, confiscating and re-granting estates under new terms, and generally flexing his muscle. Everywhere he went, he brought a copy of Adrian’s bull with him, swinging it like a hammer. Henry spent six months in Ireland before he was called away to deal with a rebellion in France led by his eldest son. But by then, the visit had served its purpose. The new Pope Alexander III praised Henry’s short and swift work in subduing a ‘barbarous nation’. Ireland had been wrenched into Rome’s sphere of control, and the Vatican was pleased. What had been a brief and mildly distracting voyage for one of the most powerful rulers in Europe had in fact opened up a bloody new chapter in history. The English had arrived in Ireland. One way or another, they would never leave.3

*

Ireland became the crown’s most lethal frontier, a wild west where law could never be counted on and danger hid in every crevice. It opened the gate for the demise of the tyrant Richard II, who was usurped by his cousin Henry while he was away putting down a rebellion across the Irish Sea in 1399. The lesson was clear: Ireland was trouble. Royal authority in the island rolled back and forth like a spring tide. As the feuding heirs of the Plantagenet dynasty fought each other to a standstill in the Wars of the Roses, Ireland slipped from their control. The descendants of the first Norman settlers had once controlled two-thirds of the island, but by the fifteenth century their footprint could only be found in and around Dublin, in the exposed plains of Leinster and Munster and in a handful of large ports such as Limerick, Cork and Drogheda. In the wild and rugged lands of Ulster and Connaught, royal power barely existed in the fiefdoms of Gaelic warlords. In those places where English influence remained strongest, however, the old Norman families flowered into a minor aristocracy prim with culture, refinement and status. They took surnames like Butler and FitzGerald; they built stunning homes, such as the great castle of Kilkenny; they practised music and fashion and commerce and passed titles and estates on to their heirs. These earls of Ormonde and Desmond and Clanricarde became known as the ‘Old English’, and in the golden days of their influence they were the crown’s right hand in Ireland. Then Martin Luther nailed his theses to a church door in Saxony in 1517, and the quiet thud of his hammer rippled over every blade of grass in Europe. The greatest continental crisis since the Black Death – the Reformation – would creep into the three kingdoms, cloaked beneath a row over a king’s thirst for a new wife. Ireland was about to be tugged into a stark and violent future.

Henry VIII, the second king of the House of Tudor, was a force of nature. He had inherited his father’s deep distrust of anything he could not control, and when the Vatican refused his petitions to have his marriage to Queen Catherine of Aragon annulled, Henry broke with Rome and established himself as supreme head of the church in England in 1534. He set aside Catherine, married his mistress Anne Boleyn and systematically began to scrub out all traces of church power and wealth in his lands. Henry tore down religious monuments, cracked open tombs, confiscated the lands of the monastic orders and rinsed the spiritual footprint of Rome from his realm. Ireland did not escape this fate. In 1537 Irish friaries and churches were subjected to the same assaults that had been carried out with such brutal efficiency in England. ‘Scarcely had there ever come so great a persecution,’ Celtic storytellers lamented. Henry did not stop. In 1541 the loyal Irish parliament passed an act that turned the island into a full kingdom of its own, with a crown that it immediately granted to Henry and his heirs. Henry was a scholar of history and canon law and knew that the legal foundation of English rule in Ireland could be traced right back to the wishes of the Vatican, sealed within the words of Adrian IV’s papal bull. Rome could – and did – try to give Ireland away to other Catholic rulers, such as the Habsburgs of Spain, once Henry had been excommunicated. But with a sword and a pen, Henry had tightened his grip on Ireland.4

The Old English nobles in Dublin, Kilkenny and Limerick watched with horror. They continued to plead loyalty to the crown, but almost all of them refused to abandon Rome and join Henry’s new church, which they saw as a heresy of ‘pride, vain-glory, avarice and lust’. Henry was rarely patient or forgiving, and neither was his daughter Elizabeth, who ultimately succeeded her half-brother Edward and half-sister Mary to the throne in 1558. She would finish, with brutal vigour, that which her father had begun.5

*

The template was drawn with blood and earth, one inch at a time. Queen Mary, Henry VIII’s eldest daughter, began in 1557 when she sponsored the first major expeditions by English settlers into the interior of Leinster. In 1583, when a second uprising in less than twenty years by the Earl of Desmond and his supporters was crushed, Queen Elizabeth took her sister’s canvas and stretched it to unimaginable proportions. The lands of the Desmond rebels in Munster were confiscated by a bill of attainder, and tens of thousands of acres were handed to new English Protestant settlers. It was social engineering on an unseen scale. Elizabeth did not need to weigh the merits: for most of her long reign she felt besieged by enemies real and imagined and carved her father’s church into a shield. The Church of England was given total legal supremacy in her lands, and the crown began to violently suppress dissenting faiths, which Elizabeth came to see as the creeds of her enemies. The fact that Madrid and the Vatican had sent military aid to the Desmond rebels only tightened her belief that Catholics, with their ultimate loyalty to Rome, could never be trusted and would have to be rooted out, one generation at a time. By 1598 there were 12,000 English settlers scattered across 500,000 acres of former Desmond lands in Munster. Each of them spoke English instead of Gaelic, each of them obeyed English law and all of them were members of Elizabeth’s Protestant church, paying taxes directly to the English exchequer. Irish Catholics, whether they had Norman or Gaelic blood, watched anxiously. Elizabeth had shown her hand and was prepared to snatch the wealth and estates that gave Ireland’s Catholic nobles their lingering power. In 1590, when a Gaelic clan leader in Monaghan was hanged for resisting a plan for an English settlement on his lands, the fuse was lit. The earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell, the most famous and powerful Gaelic lords in Ulster, understood that they were next. Before they might be left with nothing to defend, they chose to attack. Gaelic Ireland went to war.

The Nine Years War between the crown and forces led by the earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell dragged Ireland into catastrophe. At first, the royal forces were pummelled to the brink of defeat. Led by Hugh O’Neill, the Earl of Tyrone, the rebels rooted the crown’s soldiers out of Ulster and charged south. In 1598 Elizabeth’s great plantation of Munster was swept aside as English settlers were driven from the land, seeking refuge in walled towns or fleeing back across the Irish Sea. Madrid, which never missed an opportunity to harass and undermine Elizabeth, offered its support to the rebels. Clinging to Ireland by her fingernails, Elizabeth fought back. She sanctioned a massive build-up of soldiers, weapons and war materiel, and by 1599 there were 17,000 English and Welsh troops in Ireland. They were put to devastating use. Under the command of Charles Blount, Baron Mountjoy, the royal forces burned, starved and pillaged Ireland into submission. The uprising was finally quenched in 1601 when the armies of Ulster and a small Spanish relief force were scattered near the port of Kinsale in Cork. The Nine Years War had claimed the lives of some 130,000 people, most of them destitute Gaelic peasants who died from starvation and disease. Tudor power now penetrated deep into every corner of Ireland, a kingdom that was now little more than a ragged shell.

*

Elizabeth died in 1603. She was unmarried, and it was claimed that she had never once taken a man to her bed. The crown now passed to her distant cousin James Stuart, the king of Scotland, whose ascension formally unified the three kingdoms under one ruler for the first time. One of James’s first tasks was to clear away the wreckage of the Nine Years War, which was formally concluded with the Treaty of Mellifont, signed in an old abbey near Drogheda in 1603. The treaty spared the lives of the Gaelic earls who had led the uprising but forced them to abandon the ancient feudal powers that had made them princes in their own lands. It was a humbling, embarrassing slight that effectively reduced Hugh O’Neill and his kinsmen to large landowners. The shroud of suspicion that had ignited the war never truly lifted. In 1607, as O’Neill was preparing to travel to England for an audience with James, he caught a whiff of a rumour that he was to be arrested on his arrival and implicated in a Spanish plot against the king. Along with Rory O’Donnell, the new Earl of Tyrconnell, O’Neill realised that his life was at risk. In a swift and utterly unexpected move, the two earls quickly gathered together their families and a small retinue of servants and decided to flee to Spain, hoping to petition King Philip III to support their ailing cause. On 4 September 1607 the most powerful old warlords in Gaelic Ulster sailed out from Lough Swilly on a doomed crusade. ‘The winds had not wafted from Ireland, in modern times, a party of one ship who have been more illustrious or noble,’ Gaelic storytellers lamented.6

Time was creeping on, and the earls were about to be left behind. Philip III was bankrupt and could not risk an expensive war with England for the sake of sheltering a few rebellious Irishmen. He refused to allow the earls to enter Spain or reside in his territories in Flanders. O’Neill and O’Donnell were shuffled around the palaces of Europe like a hot potato before finally settling in Rome. Ignored and forced to live on a tiny allowance from the pope, the earls and their campaign to liberate their island were drowned in the concert of European politics. Idle and heartbroken, the last princes of Gaelic Ulster slowly succumbed to poverty and fever by the Tiber.

The flight of the earls was an astonishing gift for King James. In 1608, with the vast northern estates of Tyrone and Tyrconnell now up for grabs, parliament passed a law of attainder condemning O’Neill and O’Donnell as rebels and stripped them of their lands and wealth. The estates were then hewn into chunks of between 1,000 and 2,000 acres and offered to new waves of English and Scottish Protestant settlers. Mary and Elizabeth’s template was rolled out once more. Over the next thirty-five years, roughly 100,000 new settlers took up the crown’s invitation to settle in Ulster, completely remaking the ancient den of Irish Gaelic power. The crown sought to pave over all traces of Gaelic heritage in the north, and even took steps to prohibit the new settlers from employing Catholics on their land. Chronic labour shortages, however, forced this ‘New English’ class of Protestant landlords into a bitter working arrangement with Gaelic-speaking natives who despised them. The tension would fester and pass from one generation to the next like an heirloom. Ulster became a deep pot of paranoia and hate, ready to boil.

In just over a hundred years, the old notion of English power in Ireland that had lingered since the days of Henry II’s first campaign had been transformed. Crown law now extended into every province, and through defeat and misadventure the old roots of Gaelic power in Munster and Ulster had been scorched. The earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell had disappeared into the sea like jetsam. At the turn of the seventeenth century, Ireland was bound tighter than ever to her master in London. Dublin, Kilkenny, Cork, Galway and Limerick became cities of English language, teaching, commerce and dress. The visible differences between native and settler began to blur; only the quiet, inherited hatred of old remained. Religion, rather than language or bloodlines, was the new wedge driven deep into the heart of the kingdom. As the wars of reformation and counter-reformation ripped across Europe, faith became a vicious instrument. In Ulster, more than anywhere else in Ireland, Catholic and Protestant waited nervously for a violent reckoning. The wait would not be long.

3

Avalanche

The Protestant prisoners were marched for six miles in the piercing cold of November. Guns and swords poked at their backs, and most had their hands bound. They had spent more than a week in captivity and were all starving and terrified. On and on they marched, until finally the prisoners reached a thick stone bridge tilting over the River Bann in Portadown. One by one they were forced onto the bridge, stripped naked and driven into the river at gunpoint. Wails and screams were choked in the current, as the river dragged one prisoner after another to a wet grave. Rebels waiting on the bank shot anyone who swam to the shore and kicked their corpses back into the river. In a hard winter of 1641, Ulster’s great volcano of hate finally erupted. As its violence began to trickle down into the rest of the kingdom, it started an avalanche that would doom Ireland to decades of war and fire.

In February 1641 a small group of Gaelic Irish landowners had hatched a plot to seize Dublin, drive the hated English settlers out of Ulster and finish what their old brethren had started in the Nine Years War. The madness of the times, they felt, had created a perfect opportunity. Charles I’s tyrannical streak was drawing him towards an almost inevitable conflict with Westminster. In Scotland, Presbyterians fighting to protect their church from royal control had risen in rebellion, scattered the king’s army at Newburn and went on to menacingly occupy the north of England. Charles’s authority was disintegrating, one crumb at a time. The Gaelic Irish plotters, led by Rory O’Moore and Phelim O’Neill, decided that this was their moment.

Ireland under the Stuarts was no place for the decadent lifestyles of the remaining Gaelic nobles. The earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell had fled, and those left behind suffered under the burdens of falling incomes, extravagant expenses and dated visions of their own might. Despite the lean times, many had refused to kick their luxurious habits, and their credit was running low. Rory O’Moore was an old Gaelic patriarch of Leinster stock with lands in Antrim, and when he first tabled his plan for a Gaelic uprising in February 1641, he found sympathetic ears. The old Irish way of life could not survive for much longer; if Scotland could rise up, defeat the crown’s forces and demand that its concerns be taken seriously, then why not Gaelic Ireland? The three kingdoms were in the eye of a perfect storm and, to O’Moore and his rapidly widening circle of conspirators, it was time to act.

After dark on 22 October Phelim O’Neill, who was a kinsman of the old Earl of Tyrone, led a small band of soldiers in surprise attacks that seized the garrisons of Charlemont and Dungannon, some twelve miles apart in central Ulster. Almost a hundred miles south, in the capital, a plan to snatch Dublin Castle, the nexus of royal authority in Ireland, was foiled on the same night. However, within twenty-four hours, Gaelic bands across Ulster followed O’Neill’s cue and began a wave of localised attacks on English settler communities, capturing several towns and forcing others, such as Derry, Lisburn and Belfast, to bar their gates. Without any organised royal force to oppose them, the rebels effectively took control of Ulster in a few hours. It was a shocking success. Word of the lightning raids swept through the north, and soon hundreds of armed Catholic bands joined the uprising. Ulster, which had been mechanically twisted by three decades of plantation and religious bigotry, was now a province of ‘men whose minds are exasperated by the remembrance of former injuries’. Now, with most of the north falling into Gaelic hands almost overnight, the natives who had suffered under the yoke of English control began to violently settle old scores. The small stones that start an avalanche began to tumble.1

Few of the Gaelic conspirators truly believed that their rebellion would be so successful so quickly. Phelim O’Neill caught the scent of imminent carnage and desperately tried to take control of what had become a spontaneous popular uprising. On 24 October O’Neill issued a declaration insisting that the rebels refrain from violent excesses. It was wasted breath. Gangs of rebel militia armed with knives, pikes and crude old matchlock muskets began to round up English settlers and a series of tragic, unforgivable atrocities took place. Throats were slit with impunity; entire families were stripped naked and driven from their homes into the cold. The slaughter at the bridge of Portadown in Armagh, where eyewitnesses later reported seeing some one hundred Protestants drowned in the River Bann, was perhaps the most gruesome of the ‘barbarous and inhuman massacres’ that were now spreading through Ulster like wildfire. Vicious reprisals against Catholics by English settlers were also reported. Word of the sudden storm reached Westminster, where tempers were already hot. First hand reports of the rebellion became twisted and inflamed as they travelled, and by the time they reached London members of the House of Commons were told of Protestant women having babies cut from their wombs and children being forced to slit their parents’ throats. The truth dissolved in the frenzy, and it became a matter of accepted fact to many that all Irish Catholics were murderous traitors. Several members of the commons, including an MP for Cambridge named Oliver Cromwell, were listening carefully.2

With Ulster under rebel control, Phelim O’Neill marched south in late October. After laying siege to the royalist garrison at Drogheda and scattering some of the king’s soldiers outside Dublin, the Gaelic rebel leaders confronted the Catholic Norman gentry of the Pale, who had so far kept their hands clean. The old aristocrats and the heirs of Henry II’s first settlers were no longer the crown’s gatekeepers in Ireland. Protestant lords and landowners had strong-armed them out of key government posts and also now had a firm grip on both houses of the Dublin parliament. All the Old English Catholic gentry had left was royal favour – titles, lands and prospects derived directly from Charles I, who had come to see Ireland as a useful breadbasket for wealth and soldiers. Now, however, the kingdoms were slipping into civil war, and Charles’s favour might soon be worth little. Despite their shared Catholic faith, the Norman gentry had always turned their noses up at the boisterous, unpredictable Gaelic lords with O and Mac in their names. But the sands were shifting quickly. The king they relied on was tottering. A hard, puritanical parliament in Westminster was spitting flames about Irish Catholics and gathering its strength. And now, a ragged army led by Gaelic lords they never trusted was camped on the outskirts of Dublin, demanding their allegiance. With little alternative, the Catholic gentry of the capital allied themselves with the rebels. They publicly professed continued loyalty to the crown but claimed that uniting with their fellow Catholics was the only way to protect their religion and property in the dangerous times ahead. It was a decision that would condemn them all.

*

In April 1642, seven months after the rebellion had begun, the Irish lord justices – the administrators of the royal government – sent a panicked letter to London. The kingdom, they warned, was in the midst of anarchy. The royal army had 10,000 troops, but little more than half of them were in any condition to fight. Most had spent the winter sick, hungry and without pay, holed up in freezing garrisons near Dublin. There was hardly a shilling left to purchase fresh supplies. ‘The rebellion has now overspread all parts of the kingdom … the rebels are generally masters of the field.’3 A few weeks earlier, the mayor of Derry wrote that only a handful of towns in west Ulster were still holding out against the rebels, and all were living in fear of ‘a most cruel and merciless enemy’.4 The rebellion had shone a hot light on the cracks in this new Irish kingdom. King Charles’s government, which was preparing to make war against parliament at home, could no longer enforce its will on the island. The Protestants of Ulster were forced to realise that they were outnumbered, vulnerable and could only rely on themselves. In the south, the spirit of rebellion continued to stir: in March 1642 as many as 12,000 rebels had encircled the city of Cork and threatened to take the town by force or ‘starve up his Majesty’s forces in it’.5

In June, as England staggered on towards all-out civil war, a number of Irish Catholic nobles discussed a plan to form a pseudo-government to defend their lives and property, independent of the royal administration. The main thrust of the rebellion had fizzled out over the winter: despite the tacit support of the Old English gentry, the rebels did not have the strength to storm the capital and were driven out of the Pale piece by piece by royalist troops under the command of James Butler, the Protestant Earl of Ormonde. In late April, just days before the lord justices sent their frantic dispatch for help to London, Ormonde’s forces scattered the rebel forces in county Kildare. But the Catholics’ ambitions did not end there. Between November 1642 and January 1649 an independent Catholic Confederacy met in Kilkenny nine times and effectively became an alternative government to Dublin Castle. It absorbed some of the leaders of the 1641 rebellion, such as the military commander Owen Roe O’Neill, and engaged with foreign emissaries such as the powerful papal nuncio Archbishop Giovanni Rinuccini. It cloned many of the functions of a working government, appointing its own sheriffs and constables to police the law in areas under its control. Its troops scuffled with the royal forces under the control of Ormonde, who was subsequently appointed lord lieutenant of Ireland. It was the strange product of a perilous time: a Catholic assembly that swore continued loyalty to Charles but was in direct conflict with the king’s Irish administration. Both sides ultimately entered into an alliance after long, torturous negotiations. Their common enemy was about to lift its head.

In 1647, 2,000 parliamentary soldiers landed in Dublin, and after Charles’s execution in January 1649 Cromwell gave Ireland his undivided attention. Cromwell personally led an expeditionary force of some 12,000 troops, and after briefly laying siege to the royalist port town of Drogheda, thirty miles north of the capital, his soldiers unleashed their cruelty. On 11 September, Cromwell’s soldiers sacked Drogheda in one of the most horrendous incidents in Irish history. Seeking to set a brutal example for the rest of the kingdom, Cromwell forbade his soldiers to spare the lives of any man or woman found carrying a weapon. It was taken as an invitation to slaughter. Every crevice of the town was searched and pillaged, and thousands of soldiers and civilians were butchered in the streets. Hundreds fled into the town’s church seeking refuge; Cromwell’s men barred the doors and burned the building to the ground. The garrison commander who had at first refused to surrender was beaten to death with his own wooden leg. It was a hellish and brutal episode that claimed the lives of as many as 2,800 people. Somewhere in the carnage a young royalist soldier named Richard Talbot, a son of Catholic gentry from Kildare, barely out of his teens, narrowly escaped with his life. Half dead and horrified, Talbot fled to the continent with an iron grudge.

With Drogheda in ashes, Cromwell marched south to Wexford and repeated the butchery. Unrepentant, he defended his brutality as divine revenge for the Irish massacres of Protestants in 1641, labelling his work ‘a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches’.6 Cromwell was a cold Puritan who believed that to be a Catholic in Ireland was to be a traitor without the right to life, mercy or the protection of the law. Cromwell’s authority in Ireland quickly became absolute: Ormonde fled with the last remnants of the royal government in 1650, while Limerick and Athlone surrendered on terms the following summer. The western port city of Galway was the last garrison to submit to parliament in April 1652. Cromwell had stalked and bled Ireland until its carcass lay slumped at his feet. He reached into his knapsack, pulled out a knife and began to carve.

*

Parliament had been making plans for Ireland’s estates as early as March 1642, when horrendous rumours about the massacres in Ulster were whipping London into an anti-Irish frenzy. The commons passed an act inviting members of the public to invest in bonds that would go towards the cost of sending an army to crush the Irish rebellion. Investors were told that their money would later be repaid in confiscated Irish land. Over a thousand English subscribers known as ‘adventurers’ fronted more than £300,000 towards the war effort, and ten years later they handed parliament their final bill for over one million acres of prime Irish property. Other accounts now had to be settled too. With hard currency evaporating, Cromwell had enticed his troops to fight by offering Irish estates in lieu of wages. With the war finally finished, some 35,000 parliamentary soldiers were now waiting with their hands out. Cromwell’s long and exhaustive war effort had left parliament in debt to the tune of £2.5 million. Dismembering Ireland became a matter of fiscal urgency.

In 1652 the victorious parliament passed an act that effectively forced every Catholic landowner in Ireland to share blame for the war. From the rebels of 1641 to the members of the confederacy, thousands were informed that their lives and estates were no longer their own. Hundreds were executed, such as Phelim O’Neill, while thousands more either fled to the continent or were deported to English colonies in the West Indies. Rory O’Moore, one of the instigators of the 1641 uprising, slipped into obscurity before dying in 1655. Everyone else with a shred of property to their name was forced to take part in a crude land exchange programme, whereby their estates would be confiscated in return for a two-thirds equivalent holding in the western province of Connaught, where the earth was mostly mountainous, boggy and worth a pittance. A series of hurried and inaccurate land surveys took place, and the entire process sank into a pool of threats, confusion and legal wrangling. In Munster and Leinster, where the land was most valuable, more than three-quarters of Catholic estates were forfeited and carved up among subscribers, soldiers and parliament’s other creditors. It was cold victor’s justice and another brutal outing for the Tudor art of mass confiscation. Cromwell’s experiment would ultimately fail, and after his death the realm would seek the familiar comfort of a king. But by 1660, when Charles returned to England in glory, Catholics, who had held 60 per cent of Ireland’s land before 1641, now held as little as 9 per cent. The Old English gentry had fallen the hardest. If the Nine Years War had been the moment of reckoning for the Gaelic warlords of the north, then it was Cromwell who had severed the Normans from their past glory. Stripped of their wealth, identity and access to power, they were left to rue how they had gone from being the bannermen of Henry II to exiles in their own kingdom. More than anyone else in Ireland, it was the old Catholic gentry who rejoiced in the restoration of the monarchy and the return of Charles II in 1660. After a decade in penury, they were convinced that the lands and favour they had lost would be returned. They were wrong.

4

Oliver’s Shoemakers

On 14 May 1660, two weeks after Westminster had declared Charles Stuart the new king, a headless carcass was hauled through the streets of Dublin. Propped up on a hearse and surrounded by candles and emblems of state, it was towed through the damp avenues of the city followed by a line of mourners with blackened faces. As the cortège passed, men and women lining the streets of the capital took turns to stab and wallop the headless dummy, which had been stitched together as a parody of Cromwell’s deceased republic. When the procession finally reached the mayor’s residence, sweet cakes and ale were passed among the jubilant crowd. The dummy was set on fire and then ‘trod to dust and mortar’. Cromwell’s time was finally over, and a relieved and bloodied Catholic Ireland had come to dance on its corpse.1

The return of the king thrust the conundrum of Irish land immediately onto the agenda. Within weeks of Charles’s restoration, the petitions and lobbying on behalf of dispossessed Catholic landowners began on both sides of the Irish Sea. To the Old English gentry, who felt they had suffered the most during the civil war, the right to satisfaction seemed clear: they had fought against Cromwell to preserve the Stuart line and had lost their wealth, property and lives because of it. Charles owed them. However, they were not the only voices in the new king’s ear, and they were far from the loudest. In the Declaration of Breda, which had crucially won over the army, Charles had promised General Monck and the rest of the troops that he would not interfere with their lives or possessions – possessions that included, thanks to Cromwell, huge tracts of confiscated estates in Ireland. Charles knew that the army’s consent was the only reason he was no longer shuffling about in exile. Now that he was king, he could not start charging about snatching deeds from soldiers’ hands. In the first months of Charles’s reign the royal court at Whitehall became a hive of intrigue, and it soon became obvious where the king’s immediate loyalties lay. In the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, which trawled its way through parliament in the summer of 1660 and gave some legal meat to Charles’s promises from Breda, a clause was inserted excluding those ‘who have had any hand in the plotting, contriving or designing the great and heinous rebellion of Ireland’. No distinction was made between the Gaels who had first risen up in 1641 or the confederates who had tried to make hay in the mess afterwards. They were all accused of betraying royal authority, and none would be entitled to any ‘estate, liberties, franchises’ or other property. The spectre of further punishment was left to hang in the air. It was a swift and stunning setback for the Irish Catholic gentry, who had effectively been told by the new king that they were guilty until proven innocent.

In November 1660, after intense lobbying and legal counsel, Charles made his first attempt to untie the Gordian knot of Irish land ownership. In a long-winded declaration, the king confirmed that all Cromwellian soldiers and investors who had received confiscated property could keep it. Those Catholic nobles and gentry who could legally prove that they ‘had never acted against our royal father or ourself’ would get their lands back, as would particular favourites who had fled Ireland and served with the royal court in exile. Charles spoke of his ‘natural inclination to mercy’ but fudged the chance to add any more detail by stating that a long-term fix for Ireland ‘is not now before us’. With the king’s ambiguous wishes before them, it fell to the Irish parliament in Dublin to turn them into law. In 1661 the Protestant-dominated assembly sent their first draft bill to London for approval, and the intense lobbying in Whitehall and Westminster resumed. The Protestant interest in Ireland, who controlled the Dublin parliament and the king’s Irish privy council, seemed to hold every card. In order for the Irish Catholic gentry to make their case in the cutthroat halls of the royal court, they would need a lobbyist able to manhandle his way to the king’s ear. It was in this circus of whispers that the rise of Richard Talbot would begin.2