The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (59 page)

Essex’s extreme behaviour now challenged even the Queen’s loyalty. When Cecil’s embassy to France failed to dissuade Henry IV from making a separate treaty of peace with Spain, the Cecils argued in Council that England too must make peace and leave the Dutch at last
to face Philip II alone. For Essex, peace was dishonourable. Burghley, with only weeks to live, silently pointed out to Essex a verse in his psalter: ‘Men of blood shall not live out half their days.’ That July, during a quarrel, Essex turned his back on the Queen. She boxed his ears; he put his hand on his sword. Affronted, he asked, ‘Cannot princes err? Can they not wrong their subjects? Is an earthly power or authority infinite?’ He would not, he said, have taken so great an indignity at her father’s hands. Nor would Henry VIII have forgiven treason, but Elizabeth forgave Essex, perhaps for the last time. Now in self-exile from court, what was left for him?

In Ireland, there was, by 1598, a threat to Elizabeth’s sovereignty and England’s security so desperate that, said Essex, only a noble of great honour and estate, with the respect of the army, who had been a general – that is, Essex himself – could be sent. But even as Essex was given the command, and the grand title of Lord Lieutenant, he was appalled by the prospect. His father had died in Ireland. The Queen, he told Greville, planned ‘to ease her rebels in Ireland by breaking my heart’. And he thought on death. On Ash Wednesday 1599 Lancelot Andrewes preached before the Queen on the text of Deuteronomy 23:9, ‘When thou goest out with the host against thine enemies, keep thee then from all wickedness.’ He had a warning for Essex: ‘War is no matter of sport.’

Rebellion in Ulster and Connacht had turned into war throughout Ireland. Rebellion in Ireland had been called ‘universal’ before, but this time it was. What had begun as a revolt against the depredations of English officials and Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam’s encroachments became a struggle for freedom from English sovereignty. The submission of the Gaelic lords to the Crown had only been conditional: once their submission threatened the extinction of their lordships by breaking the military power which upheld them and by making their dependants freeholders, they turned to defence. Defence of lordship and private interest was transformed – for reasons of strategy as well as faith – into a self-styled crusade; first for liberty of conscience, and then for the formal re-establishment of the Catholic religion. In June 1595 Hugh O’Neill, the Earl of Tyrone, was proclaimed traitor, but now he did not admit himself to be a subject. That September he was inaugurated as the O’Neill at the Stone of Tullaghoge. The Earl of Tyrone, the Queen’s
feudatory, might be traitor, but not the O’Neill, Prince of Ulster. Some thought that he aimed to be king of Ireland: perhaps, but it was in September 1595 that O’Neill and O’Donnell wrote to Philip II, asking for aid, ‘now or never’, and promised him a kingdom.

O’Neill and O’Donnell offered to be vassals of the King of Spain, but they were also princes themselves. The Gaelic lords remembered that their ancestors had been provincial kings of Ireland. The drawing together of an Irish confederacy to defend Gaelic lordship now greatly extended the power of the overlords. As Earl of Tyrone, O’Neill had acted, or pretended to act, as the Queen’s lieutenant, arbitrating between Ulster underlords and redressing grievances. The Crown and the traditional overlords contended for control of the underlords,
uirríthe
– ‘our urriaghs’, said the Queen. Now, at war, the great lords of Ulster and Connacht demanded hostages, bonnaght (mercenaries), tribute and ‘risings out’ (military service) from their underlords as pledges of their dependency, and they obeyed. Cormac MacBaron O’Neill wrote to Philip II in 1596 that ‘all the Irish obey O’Neill as the sails obey the wind’. The devotion was of love, he said; but the taking of hostages and the capture of herds as pledges, and the offers to the lords of ‘buyings’ (the payment of protection money to gain respite from predatory soldiers), suggest otherwise. The lordship of Sligo was ‘awed’ by O’Donnell. The power to establish
uirríthe
in dependent lordships was the test of overlordship. At Christmas 1595 O’Donnell ordered that the ‘royal rath’ (fort and residence) of the O’Donnells be surrounded by rings of troops, and exercised his right as overlord of Connacht to arbitrate in the Burke succession dispute. He inaugurated his ally Tibbot Fitzwater Kittagh as the Lower MacWilliam. Soon O’Neill was intervening in succession disputes within lordships, not only in Ulster but throughout Ireland, deposing one lord, establishing another: the sign of his paramountcy. Elizabeth might write scornfully of O’Neill as a ‘base, bush kern’ but, acknowledging his hold over his followers, she also called him their ‘golden calf’.

The English scorned the sovereign claims of O’Neill and O’Donnell, their protestations of ancient liberties and the integrity of Gaelic law and custom, and were especially contemptuous of their newly discovered quest for liberty of conscience. They, too, could present the Irish war as one of liberation, and pose as the champions of the common people of Ireland against lords who rebelled in no interests but their own, and who ruled as ‘absolute tyrants’. The common people of Ireland, knowing
‘no other king but their landlord, dare not but be ready to rise out with them’ in any rebellion, wrote Barnaby Rich in 1599. Spenser said the same. The way to pacify Ireland, according to the English reformers, was to establish freehold tenure, which would release the people from fear of eviction. In 1594 Captain Dawtrey had told the Queen that Irish lords did not distinguish between ‘
Meum
and
tuum
[mine and yours] and will have all that their sword can keep’. The extension of common law would protect the people from the arbitrary justice of the lords; protect the weak from the strong.

The more violent and oppressive practices of the nobility in England had been curbed. Now the way to stability in Ireland was thought to be by subduing the Gaelic lords and those Anglo-Irish lords who still aspired to rule independent palatinates. When Shakespeare’s audiences watched
Henry IV, Part 1
, first performed at some time between August 1596 and February 1598 as the Irish war entered a critical phase, did they see in Glendower’s revolt something of Tyrone’s resistance? When they saw Hotspur, reeking with blood on the battlefield, confront the ‘perfumed popinjay’ sent from a court like their own, were they reminded of the martial ethos of the late medieval nobility, who valued honour more than life? As they thought of that lost warrior code, did they think of the man in whom it was revived, sent in 1599 against the rebellious Irish lords: Essex?

Early in August 1598 Cecil wrote to Sir Geoffrey Fenton, Secretary of State for Ireland, instructing him to arrange for O’Neill’s assassination. ‘We have always in Ireland given head money for the killing of rebels,’ acknowledged Ralegh, who was wise in the ways of Ireland. Unfortunately for England, the practice failed. After a brilliant victory by O’Neill, O’Donnell and Maguire over Marshal Bagenal at the Battle of the Yellow Ford on the Blackwater River on 14 August 1598 Elizabeth had all but lost Ireland. Ulster was under O’Neill’s control; Connacht under O’Donnell’s. The perennially dissident lords of Leinster had, in 1596, made common cause with the confederates. In July 1596 the northern lords wrote urging all the ‘Irishry’, especially the ‘gentlemen of Munster’, to ‘make war with us’. Soon they did. Early in October 1598 O’Neill sent a raiding party from Leinster into Munster and within days the province was in revolt. Munster’s dispossessed took a terrible revenge upon the English settlers. The anonymous author of a pamphlet whose title chillingly expressed its purpose –
A Supplication of the Blood of the English most lamentably murdered in Ireland, crying out of the earth
for revenge
– asked ‘Why were the rocks and walls painted with the blood and brains of children?’ and answered simply, ‘Because we
and they
were English.’

The Anglo-Irish lords of Munster – the Fitzthomases, the Knights of Kerry and Glin, the White Knight, the Barons of Lixnaw and Cahir, Viscount Mountgarret and Lord Roche – led the revolt or, at the least, did not prevent the slaughter. Two of the Gaelic MacCarthy septs, old enemies of the Desmonds, had held back. The character Irenius in Spenser’s
View of the Present State of Ireland
(1596) had said that the Anglo-Irish were ‘more malicious to the English than the very Irish themselves’. The warnings of Anglo-Irish degeneracy now seemed horribly prescient. Spenser himself was driven from Ireland, his castle of Kilcolman razed. The Geraldine affinity, leaderless after the death of the 15th Earl of Desmond in 1583, found their new leader in the illegitimate claimant, James Fitzthomas, whom O’Neill created Earl of Desmond. But only kings had the authority to create earls, and Fitzthomas was called disparagingly
súgán
, the ‘straw-rope’ earl: one false earl created by another, said the English. In many lordships, the malcontents looked to O’Neill to raise them against their rivals, and O’Neill promised to promote those who supported him and to depose those who would not.

The New English were hated because they took the land of the Irish and because they were English, but also because they were Protestants and therefore heretics. If the author of the
Supplication
spoke for them all, the New English saw the Irish, among whom they lived, as reprobate; ‘
their
God for whom they fight’ was ‘mortal’, ‘sleeping’, ‘feeble’; the settlers’ own, omnipotent, but punishing them for condoning popery. At a meeting of confederate Munster lords at Cahir in November, the papal legate preached hellfire to those who acknowledged Elizabeth as queen. The rebels prayed for the confusion of England’s Queen, who was no longer Ireland’s. If Elizabeth wanted the crown of Ireland, she must fight for it. All that remained for her was to begin a second conquest.

Essex landed in Ireland in April 1599 to lead an army of 16,000 foot and 1,300 cavalry. His command of so great an army, the amplitude of the commission granted to him, the alacrity of the swordsmen and volunteers to serve with him, seemed to cause as much alarm among those at home who feared his wayward ambition as among the Irish rebels. His greatness was now seen to depend as much on the Queen’s fear as on her love of him. With every parley, truce and pardon through
1595, 1596 and 1597, the rebels had mustered and armed and trained. O’Neill now led against the English the same troops who had fought for them. As Essex arrived, the confederate army was divided into two commands: in Ulster, under O’Neill, were all the O’Neill underlords – MacMahon, Magennis, O’Quinn and O’Hanlon – a force of 6,000; in Connacht, under O’Donnell, were Maguire, O’Rourke and the MacWilliam – a force of 4,000. For all the English superiority in numbers, Essex still feared that, as he wrote, the plaster would hardly cover the wound. Already by the end of April he had been persuaded to abandon his first purpose, the only strategy that could bring success: an expedition against O’Neill in Ulster. ‘All was nothing without that, and nothing was too much for that,’ the Queen had written.

Instead of the journey into Ulster, he distracted himself and exhausted his troops through May and June by diversionary ‘petty undertakings’ against the rebels in Munster and Leinster. Phelim MacFeagh O’Byrne, ‘the wolf of the mountain’, inflicted a humiliating defeat upon English forces in Wicklow on 29 May. The Queen received reports of Essex’s campaign with dismay: his only success, the capture of Cahir Castle from ‘beggarly rogues’, was a worthless feat; she was paying £1,000 a day for the Earl to go in progress. The strategy of O’Neill, ensconced in his Ulster sanctuary, guarded by defensible passes, provisioned by his great herds and sustained by money from Spain, was to make the English hunt him. The English ‘gallants’, epitomized by the Earl of Southampton whom, to the Queen’s fury, Essex made General of the Horse, longed for cavalry charges, which the Irish always avoided. By a policy of defence and interminable delay, O’Neill intended to bring down upon the English ‘the three furies, Penury, Sickness and Famine’, break them by exhaustion and despair, and terrify them in a waiting game. Essex, who had condemned ‘idle wanderings’ and longed to take the war into Spain, would not take the war into Ulster. Reports came to his enemies in England that all his actions were ‘to small purpose’.

Essex had always thought his Irish expedition foredoomed: ‘I am like to be a martyr in Ireland for the Queen.’ Exile from court exposed him to his enemies, who ‘now in the dark give me wound upon wound’. He named names: Lord Cobham and Ralegh. ‘I am defeated in England,’ he wrote bitterly on 1 July; sent to Ireland with armour only for his front, he was wounded in the back, and ‘to the heart’. How could successful war be waged by a disgraced commander? But his failure in Ireland was his own; a failure of strategy and morale. By the time he
was stiffened to take his ‘northern journey’ against O’Neill, only a remnant of his great army remained. News of the disaster inflicted by O’Donnell upon Sir Conyers Clifford, President of Connacht in the Curlews Mountains, Roscommon on 5 August persuaded the ‘little army’ left to Essex of the inevitability of defeat. The Irish among the troops went over to the rebels ‘by herds’, the others lay sick. ‘These base clowns,’ wrote Essex, must be taught to fight again. On 21 August the Council of War in Dublin wrote to England that the remaining army of only 3,500 men would be ‘far overmatched’ if it met the rebel army of the north.