Ireland's OWN: History

 

‘Nine Years’ War —by Máirtín Pilib de Longbhuel ‘Nine Years’ War was essentially a conflict between local power and the centralizing aspirations of crown government’. Ireland in 1590 was largely under Tudor rule, i.e., under the rule of the English crown. This imperialist occupation was maintained throughout most of Ireland through “a system of garrisons and devolved government [that] had been created to contain and localize disturbances”, often supported by loyalist settlers. It now seemed this system would be extended into Ulster, which at the time was Ireland’s most rugged and least accessible province, in order for the English crown to attain a monopoly of power all over Ireland. A frontier ran from east to west, from Down, through Cavan, to Sligo (the latter of which had recently fallen into the hands of the English following the death of Sir Donald O’Connor). The grip was now tightening on Ulster. Hugh O’Neill (Earl of Tyrone) was leader of the O’Neill clan in Ulster, but more than that he was the father-in-law of two other clan leaders in the province: Red Hugh O’Donnell and Hugh Maguire, both of whom were younger than Tyrone. These factors gave him a position as natural leader in Ulster. Tyrone’s third wife was Mabel Bagenal, the sister of the English marshal, Sir Henry Bagenal. Tyrone claimed that the marriage “would bring civility into my house and among the country people”. Tyrone was fostered by an English settler family and now had dynastic marriages to other native Irish clans (initiating him for position of head of a Gaelic confederacy), still while retaining his connections in Dublin as an English earl. Initially he used his dual position neither to further the aspirations of the crown or to strengthen local rule in Ulster, but played once against the other to bide himself time and to benefit himself. “Torn between two civilizations O’Neill could hardly fail to be accused of duplicity”. An early example of his alleged duplicity was when he took possession of lands in Ulster in 1568 (permitted by the Earl of Essex, Sir Henry Sydney) and in 1574 helped the Earl of Essex against Brian McPhelim O’Neill. “So began his Janus-like attitude of balancing loyalty to the Crown against his own reasonable ambitions in Ulster”. This, however, did not hinder is position as an important Gaelic leader, and he demonstrated his strength and importance in May 1593 when Maguire mounted a raid on Sligo and Roscommon (essentially a local leader physically resisting changes which the crown had been trying to bring about) and Tyrone collaborated with Bagenal in order to defeat Maguire, which they did at Belleek in October. This won Tyrone favour with Queen Elizabeth. However he claimed that Bagenal and Fitzwilliam were plotting against him. Elizabeth informed Tyrone that “Fitzwilliam had been withdrawn and Bagenal forbidden to act against him. Yet the earl received no positive recognition or support”, but Elizabeth allowed him 600 troops of his own, under his command, trained by English captains. In June 1594 Tyrone arrived in Dublin promising to quell the native Irish disturbances in Ulster and to restore peace, but these promises he didn’t keep. He simply used them to buy himself time and to allow him to militarize for in May 1595 he was in open rebellion himself. Tyrone was now head of a confederacy of Red Hugh O’Donnell, Hugh Maguire, Brian Óg O’Rourke and the Mayo Burke Chief. He headed this with his own troops, which were trained with the permission of the crown, and trained by six English officers. Throughout the training of his troops Tyrone alternated the men being trained, i.e. he would train 600 men, and when they were fully trained release them from his control, then he would train another 600, and when they were fully trained release them also. He repeated this, resulting in thousands of men having passed through the ranks. The final result was that on the eve of rebellion it was estimated that Tyrone had under his command troops numbering 1,000 pike-men, 4,000 musketeers and 1,000 cavalry. He had an army ten times the strength it might otherwise have been. In a tactical sense Tyrone was militarily ingenious. The first phase of the rebellion was effectively a guerrilla war in which Tyrone used the tactic of surprise when engaging his enemy. It must also be stressed that this phase of the war was a defensive one, not one of going on the offensive against the crown forces. It is claimed that initially it was a war to preserve Gaelic culture in Ulster and to loosen the crown’s ever tightening grip on the province. O’Faolain writes that “they rarely if ever attacked gratuitously: they let the enemy wear himself out”. And it was effective to the point that the English army was constantly on the brink of starvation. What the confederate guerrilla war started the ruggedness and inconsistency of Ireland finished. O’Faolain also quotes an excerpt from the Calendar of State Papers: 1599; “Tyrone will cess the three Furies of Penury, Sickness and Famine upon Her Majesty’s armies that are to assail him in Ulster”. The Confederates knew that at this early stage of the war this was the best option when trying to defeat the enemy. They dared not engage the enemy in open-field battle (at this stage in the rebellion help from Spain had not been dispatched and the old English, almost in its entirety, were opposed to it believing it would only cause civil unrest). In February 1595 Bagenal set out to relieve Monaghan, which had been invested by Tyrone. On the return journey to Newry Bagenal suffered defeat at the hands of the Confederates at Clontibret. “Tyrone astonished his opponents by fielding a force of musketeers clad ‘in red coats like English soldiers’”. Militarily the ambush at Clontibret was a victory, but “the moral effect of Clontibret was staggering…the Irish at any given time risen up in simultaneous wrath they could have swept them [English forces] into the sea by sheer avoirdupois”. Similar attacks continued and before the summer of that year the English communications on the frontier had been reduced to Newry-Monaghan-Sligo. And even with the near destruction of the English frontier Tyrone remained adamant to be drawn into open-field battle. “There was no fighting in the classical sense of the word. They [English forces] faced wraiths and fogs and not an army”. The English military problem in Ireland was quite complex, not least their ability to master the terrain, etc. Tyrone recognized these opportunities and exploited them (an early example of England’s difficulty being Ireland’s opportunity). Clontibret inspired much of Connaught to rebel. “At once all the suppressed angers of the West broke out…and within a month Bingham had to report that four-fifths of the province was out of control. Clontibret had the opposite effect on the colonists. They began to bicker among themselves and in this disunion they made some bad mistakes”. And the inability of the England to recognize Tyrone’s tactics cost them dearly. “They taunted the Irish with being cowards and crowned their fury by calling Tyrone ‘The Running Beast’”. As a result of Clontibret and subsequent events the two sides became locked in a stalemate, and a truce was called. Negotiation was now to begin. Throughout the war the possibility of Spanish intervention had always lingered in the background. Even as far back as the beginning of the rebellion, before Tyrone’s initial participation O’Donnell and Maguire collaborated with the archbishop of Tuam to appeal for Spanish help. For the Spaniards to intervene in the rebellion on behalf of the Gaelic Irish would make the end of the rebellion simply being a domestic war but would put a whole new European dimension to it. “Although Tyrone was aware of the plot, to the experienced earl a catholic confederacy to establish an independent Ireland under Spanish suzerainty must have seemed and enormous gamble”. It’s possible that Tyrone’s primary fear would have been that English occupation might have been replaced with Spanish occupation. Ireland would practically be in the same position. But his wariness of inviting Spain to intervene seemed to have disappeared by the time the truce following Clontibret came about. This time it was he who appealed for help from Philip II, and not O’Donnell and Maguire as had the case been in the past. “Tyrone tried to improve his position by fresh negotiations with Spain, carried out through Don Alonso de Cobos, who had arrived in Killybegs harbour, and a tortuous game of playing off the English and Spanish began”. The confederates remained in peaceful negotiations with the crown, seemingly by May 1596 Spanish help would fail to materialize and so a final settlement was being drawn up. “However the negotiations collapsed when Philip II – his interest aroused by Elizabeth’s failure to crush Tyrone – sent three separate missions to the confederates, to encourage them to continue resistance, to assess their military strength, and to survey the coasts and harbours for a possible Spanish invasion”. It was the opportunity the confederates had been waiting for, and they immediately ended negotiations and launched an offensive war. Tactically Tyrone was cunning, militarily as well as being able to appeal to the emotion. He extended the appeal of the confederate campaign “to the old English towns. This involved stressing the religious dimension of the struggle as a war to defend Catholicism. The main thrust of his propaganda was his ingenious attempt to adapt Old English commonwealth ideas to develop a new faith-and-fatherland nationalist ideology”. However his attempt at bringing all Irish Catholics under the faith-and-fatherland banner was in vain as there was continuity in the Old English refusal to commit themselves to the struggle, despite the fact that he portrayed the struggle as a crusade against an anti-Catholic force, under which the Old English suffered also. His faith-and-fatherland appeal might be looked upon as an ultimatum to the Old English: loyalty to the crown, or loyalty to the Pope. Tyrone and Philip collaborated with each other for mutual benefit. The Spanish were simply planning to use Ireland as a base from which to attack England. “From the Spanish point of view Ireland was but a pawn in a game”, Ireland was the back door to England, while Tyrone exploited Spain’s ability to provide military assistance. For both the confederacy and the Spanish the ‘defenders of the faith’ banner may have been used as nothing more than a flag of convenience and a way to make their alliance seem legitimate, while striving to attain political goals of their own. As to whether or not The Nine Years War was essentially a conflict between local power and the centralizing aspirations of crown government is disputed. Some argue that the rebellion began as a fight for the survival of Gaelic culture, which was under threat from the encroaching English. It was resistance to change. O’Faolain writes that “the strategy of the Irish wars…was conditioned almost entirely by food”. In that sense the war was transformed from a war for survival of a culture to a war of literal survival in which the opposing sides suffered hunger, etc. at the hands of the other. It would seem this was the case in the early stages of the war, and the dispatch of Spanish help in 1596 marked not only a tactical military change for the confederates (who now launched an offensive war in place of the defensive one of the several years previous), but it also marked for them an end to a resistance war to a war in which Tyrone, through military successes of the past realized his capabilities as a leader. He demonstrated his ability to arbitrate and lead in a society which had previously been plagued with constant internal wars and divisions between the clans. If Ireland was to have a leader after an English withdrawal Tyrone proved himself worthy to be the man who was fill the vacuum they left behind. Spain looked upon the war in Ireland not as one of local power struggling against the crown but as a means by which they could use the situation in Ireland to achieve their own success in Europe. The religious dimension was exploited in order for them to legitimize using Ireland to attack England. And it was a religious war for the Irish too in that sectarian atrocities did occur. Philip O’Sullivan Beare wrote of O’Donnell that “In his raids extending far and wide he destroyed the English colonists and settlers, put them to flight and slew them, sparing no male between fifteen and sixty years old who was unable to speak Irish”. There is a lot of uncertainty as regards what happened during the war, but what is certain is that the Nine Years War ended after Kinsale with the defeat of the Gaels and because of the flight of the earls several years later the English presence in Ireland was strengthened. English rule in Ireland wouldn’t be threatened in such a manner and to such an extent for 200 years. Paradoxically in the 1798 rebellion, like two centuries before, foreign help to expel the English from Ireland was sought, promised and dispatched. On both occasions a ‘Protestant wind’ prevented the help from reaching Ireland’s shore. Sources: Ellis, Steven G, Ireland in the Age of the Tudors 1447-1603, Longman, London (1998) Morton, Grenfell, Elizabethan Ireland (Patrick Richardson Edition), Longman, London (1971) O’Faolain, Seán, The Great O’Neill: A Biography of Hugh O’Neill Earl of Tyrone, 1550-1616, The Mercier Press, Dublin (1942) Page last updated 14 Feb 2004 Ireland's OWN Logo by Eamann Website Design and Celtic Background by DM Gould Copyright © 2004 Ireland's OWN All Rights Reserved.