The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (61 page)

Mountjoy understood that it was upon the ‘fortune of the north’ that the reduction of the rest of the kingdom depended. All rested upon the defeat of O’Neill and O’Donnell. By May 1600 he and his lieutenant Sir Henry Docwra had established a fort on the shores of Lough Foyle. By lightning raids through the Midlands that summer, Mountjoy secured the Pale, and in October forced a passage through the Moyry Pass between Dundalk and Newry, the traditional gateway to Ulster. In August he had promised, ‘I will hunt these squirrels even out of their strongest woods.’ Not so easy. ‘You have held,’ wrote Cecil to Carew in September, that ‘the war of famine must end the rebellion.’ The destruction of harvests and the capture of herds were tactics used by both sides, sure and devastating. In the summer of 1600 Carew drove the rebels from Kerry: ‘Now (I thank God) their harvest is ours.’ If any objected that the loyal would suffer with the disloyal, the answer came that there were few enough of the former.

By the end of the year Sir George Carew had pacified most of Munster,
at least outwardly. His means, as befitted Cecil’s friend, were politic as well as military. His artillery undermined castles, and his playing upon their factions, spreading dissension and fear of betrayal, undermined the rebels. He and Cecil now determined to restore the old power structure, but tamed, and to supplant the
súgán
earl by the legitimate Desmond who had been in prison since his father’s rebellion. Both the Queen and the poet Ben Jonson, who may have been Desmond’s tutor in the Tower, were fearful. Jonson warned Desmond against ‘politic pretext, that wries a state’, and implored him to stand ‘As far from all revolt, as you are now from fortune.’ In October 1600 Desmond returned to Munster, the ‘Queen’s earl’. At first he was greeted with honour, but his Protestant faith was soon seen as an affront to his Geraldine blood, and he came back to England disappointed and dishonoured in the following spring. By the end of the autumn of 1600, Florence MacCarthy had submitted, the threat that he might become Gaelic overlord of Munster never fulfilled, and the next spring the fugitive
súgán
earl was captured. From the summer of 1601 both were in the Tower. Famine and military defeat undermined the rebellion in Ulster. As it became plain that O’Neill was not invincible, divisions appeared among the rebels, and his underlords, over whom he had ruled by the strong hand, began to drift away. Many Ulster lords sought pardons, and in Connacht Niall Garve O’Donnell formed an alliance with Docwra. Not that such agreements were adamantine. For Fynes Moryson, Mountjoy’s secretary, the ‘rebellion was nourished and increased by nothing more than frequent protections and pardons’. The rebels saw pardons only as a way of recovering themselves until they rebelled again, until the Spaniards arrived.

In September 1601 a Spanish fleet was sighted off the Old Head of Kinsale. At last, this was the significant landing the English had feared since the beginning of the war with Spain. Through November Mountjoy laid a tighter and tighter siege upon the Spanish in Kinsale as O’Neill and O’Donnell marched south, with great forces, plundering as they passed. The united Spanish and confederate forces, if joined by the Irish of Munster, might finally drive the English out of Ireland, and make Ireland a bridge for the invasion of England. Young English bloods, disporting themselves at Lecale garrison in Down, would remember the misery of Mountjoy’s camp – ‘intolerable cold, dreadful labour, and want of almost everything’; and, besieged as well as besieging, the uncertainty. O’Neill’s tactic was always the waiting game; to let cold, despair and desertion drive away the English; O’Donnell’s strategy
was more heroic and impetuous, and it was his which prevailed. On Christmas Eve the Irish prepared to attack, and the English risked all on a dawn cavalry charge outside Kinsale. ‘The dice were cast, the kingdom being ready to sway on that side that proved victorious,’ wrote Carew. The Irish were routed. No one doubted the significance of the defeat. For the Four Masters, ‘immense and countless was the loss in that place’; not in terms of lives lost, but

The Spanish departed in the spring. O’Neill withdrew to his Ulster redoubts, and on 27 December O’Donnell took ship to Spain, seeking further aid. An assassin followed him; not without Carew’s connivance. O’Donnell’s bard, Eoghan Ruadh Mac an Bhaird (Red Owen Mac Ward) feared for his chief as he sailed:

He was right to be fearful. O’Donnell died in Simancas, near Valladolid, in September 1602. His loss was disastrous for his cause. Soon after his brother’s death the new chief, Rory O’Donnell, submitted.

Pacata Hibernia
: Ireland pacified. As each Gaelic chief in turn received protection and made peace, the rebellion was broken and the war was over. But at a terrible cost for England. Elizabeth knew that the war had brought ‘the alienation of our people from us’. Although in the Parliament of 1601 Cecil approvingly recalled the example of the women of Rome who gave their jewels to pay for the war against Hannibal, most felt resentment of the seemingly endless cost (of £2 million and more), the financial expedients and dodges – especially the ‘great monster’ of the sale of monopolies – practised to finance the Irish campaigns. ‘That land of Ire has exhausted this land of promise’, so a weary Cecil had written in 1600. Lives were lost fighting a war which the English, by their misunderstanding and mismanagement, had not prevented.

And for Ireland. The costs of rebellion and war were fateful. Ireland’s population, unlike that elsewhere in Europe, had never grown during the sixteenth century. Now the depredations of war and the devastation
of crops and herds brought famine to Ulster, as once before to Munster, and with it an inhumanity born of despair. Ulster was a wilderness. Debasement of the Irish coinage further undermined the fragile economy of the island. In defeat, the Irish fought among themselves. Bitter divisions grew as some made accommodation with the English and some fought on. As O’Sullivan Beare retreated from the rout of his forces at the siege of Dunboy, and made his desperate journey from Bantry to Leitrim, as many lords attacked him as sheltered him. When Niall Garve went over to the English, his wife Nuala, O’Donnell’s sister, deserted him. The chief hope of those who yearned for Irish independence lay in the prospect of the Spanish returning; their principal fear, according to Lord Deputy Mountjoy, was that ‘upon a peace will ensue a severe reformation of religion’.

Still O’Neill held out, and none among the Irish would, wrote Mountjoy sardonically, ‘lay violent hands on their sacred prince… their O’Neill’. In October 1602 the Queen was resolved not to give the arch-traitor ‘grace in any kind’. But by 17 February 1603 she was resigned, and wrote authorizing Mountjoy to offer him life, liberty and pardon, on terms. He must renounce allegiance to foreign princes and the name of O’Neill. On 30 March O’Neill came to Mellifont in County Louth. Here in the first Cistercian abbey in Ireland, now converted into a fortified house, he submitted. What Mountjoy knew already, and O’Neill did not, was that the Queen who offered her rebel pardon, to whom he submitted, was nearly a week dead.

The pageants held in Elizabeth’s honour in 1602 still venerated her as Cynthia, ‘queen of love and beauty’, as timeless, unchanging. At the last great festival of the reign, Cecil’s entertainment for the Queen, held at Cecil House on the Strand on 6 December 1602, tapers burnt before Astraea’s shrine, in honour of this ‘saint’, ‘to whom all hearts devotion owe’. Astraea, the just virgin of Virgil’s
Eclogues
whose return to earth brought a golden age of peace and eternal spring, was Elizabeth. Knowingly, her subjects practised a form of royal idolatry. But they knew that mutability must touch Cynthia, and feared the chaos which would follow if she withdrew her light from the world. The imperial virgin was tired, lonely and suddenly fearful, and the bonds between worshipped and worshippers grew strained. Her people were wearying of her reign and of her exercise of authority through insistence upon her loving
concern. ‘We did all love her,’ so Sir John Harington remembered, ‘for she said she loved us, and much wisdom she showed in this matter.’

By the middle of March 1603 Elizabeth was dying. She was restless, sleepless; she refused to take medicine, refused to eat, refused to go to bed. She sighed and sighed, as she had never done, except when Mary, Queen of Scots was beheaded. This was a dangerous moment for England, still at war with Spain. The Queen might become incapable of ruling. Even until her last hours she would never name her successor, lest her subjects’ love and duty pass from her to the ‘rising sun’. There were still, in 1600, at least twelve claimants for England’s throne. The most formidable was the Infanta Isabella, wife of Archduke Albert, Governor in Flanders, the hope of Catholics loyal to the Pope. Henry VIII’s line had at last failed (though lasting longer than he had feared); now Henry VII’s direct descendant was James Stewart.

Although the Queen did not know it – and would have been enraged had she known – those who were ‘most inward with her’ had been most forward in communicating with the likely heir. Essex had kept a letter, purportedly from James VI, in a black purse around his neck. Listening to Essex’s fevered suspicions that Elizabeth’s councillors favoured a Spanish succession, and dazzled by his martial schemes, James had once thought that he would have to fight for his new kingdoms, and had persuaded the principal nobility of Scotland to enter a ‘band’ to defend his safety and his right. After Essex’s death, wiser counsels – Cecil’s counsels – prevailed, and James saw the wisdom of waiting upon ‘God’s time’. He now looked for his succession not by force but by right, ‘with the favour of the people, and not as a conqueror’. Throughout the country, almost everyone acknowledged his claim, and those who did not kept silent. Leading figures wrote to James, their names encoded, in order to secure his safety, and their own; the kingdom’s fortunes, and their own, ‘when God should see His time’.

On the afternoon of Wednesday 23 March, speechless and dying, Elizabeth at last signalled that the King of Scots should succeed her. That night, so Robert Carey, Elizabeth’s much younger cousin, recalled, her archbishop knelt by her in prayer, and told her ‘what she was, and what she was to come to; and though she had been long a great queen here upon earth, yet shortly she was to yield an account of her stewardship to the King of Kings’. And when she did, she might have told Him what she had so often told her people: that England might have had a ‘prince more wise’, but would never have one ‘more loving’; that ‘in this world’
she had desired nothing more than ‘to preserve them in peace and to keep them from oppression and wrong’. She had asked her last Parliament, almost rhetorically, ‘What am I as of myself, without the watchful providence of almighty God, other than a poor silly woman, weak and subject to many imperfections, expecting as you do a future judgement?’ The time for judgement had come.

Epilogue

LOST WORLDS
,
NEW WORLDS

On the festival of Holy Cross in September 1607 the Earls of Tyrone and Tirconnell, and the chiefs Maguire and Magennis, with their families and followers, and leading Anglo-Irish families of north Leinster set sail from Ulster, pre-empting their arrest. They sought sanctuary in the Spanish Netherlands, for a time. O’Neill and Rory O’Donnell had been pardoned after Kinsale and confirmed in their vast estates with the titles of Earls of Tyrone and Tirconnell, yet they had never intended their submission to last. The fears and rumours among the English governors that the Earls were still in league with Spain, and that they were conspiring with the Anglo-Irish community to renew revolt in the name of the Catholic faith, were not unfounded. As official religious policy turned to repression, the Anglo-Irish, who had held back from joining Tyrone in rebellion before, now began to countenance it. The Four Masters lamented the Earls’ precipitate decision: ‘Woe to the heart that meditated… setting out on this voyage, without knowing whether they should ever return… to the end of the world.’ They never did. Sanctuary became permanent exile.

With the flight of the Earls, the independent Gaelic order in Ulster, in Ireland, passed. The power of the Gaelic lords was broken, their great estates confiscated, their private alliances and armies disbanded, their followers leaderless. Ulster was reduced to submission by garrisons. Desolate and ‘waste’, it was at last the ‘razed table’ which English hardliners had advocated. Ireland lay open to colonizers, who not only enriched themselves but saw a right and a duty to impose law, civility and the Protestant religion. A new world of English and Scottish planters came to ‘banish’ Ireland.