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Kinsale, 1601

There appear to have been four main reasons for the Irish success in the years before 1601. First there was O'Neill's leadership, which was outstanding and in the Irish context quite unprecedented. O'Neill was the heart and soul of the struggle. He was, we may well say, a man of genius: skilful, patient, infinitely resourceful - a great organiser, a subtle and a crafty negotiator, a great leader as well as a great soldier. 'The reputation he has with the enemy,' said Matthew de Oviedo, Archbishop of Dublin, 'is so great that it alone sustains the war.'

Secondly, the Irish fought for what they believed was a worthy cause. The war was the greatest, as it was the last, effort made to prevent the abolition of the old Irish institutional system by the centralised administration of England. English observers were in doubt about Irish motives. O'Neill, they said, would not 'be content with less than absolute command like a Prince of Ulster'.

Perhaps indeed he sought more. Hugh O'Donnell, attacking a castle in 1595 and summoning it in the name of 'the Prince of Ireland', drew the response that the defenders knew no other Prince of Ireland than the Queen, whereupon O'Donnell said that those who served the Queen in Ireland were rebels and traitors, and that 'his Prince and the Prince of Ireland' was O'Neill. It was believed in 1600 that this Irish Prince had even higher hopes and that he aimed 'to wear a crown'. In 1601 the object of the Irish, who remembered 'that their ancestors have been monarchs and provincial kings of this land', was said to be 'by strong hand to regain the crown of Ireland to themselves'; in parenthesis, one wonders what regal dignity they were presumed originally to have possessed - the High Kingship? O'Neill encouraged the view that he was fighting to defend Irish institutions. He hoped that 'this island of Ireland shall be at our direction and counsel as Irishmen' and declared that he would do the best that he could for God and his country 'against the enemies and tyrants of the same'. He had, in seeking allies outside Ulster, 'the ancient swelling and desire of liberty in a conquered nation to work upon'. The hope of those who sided with him was to be 'allowed their Macs and Oes', that is, to be allowed to retain their native system of independent lordships each under its own ruling family. They strove 'for the maintenance of their tanist law and old Irish customs', and for 'the gaining of the kingdom to themselves'.

To these motives another was added as the years advanced. Hugh O'Neill soon proclaimed himself the Catholic champion. The European call for a crusade against heresy was heard, and although there had as yet been scarcely any persecution in Ireland for religion's sake, the war became something of a rally of Catholics against Protestants. The Queen's Irish Council summed it all up in 1597 when they said: 'The rebels stand not as heretofore upon terms of oppression and country grievances, but pretend to recover their ancient land and territories out of the Englishmen's hands, and [strive] for the restoring of the Romish religion, and to cast off English laws and government, and to bring the realm to the tanist law, acknowledging Tyrone to be lieutenant to the Pope and King of Spain.' This was a formidable combination of motives. The Irish had here a cause to be defended such as had not called them before. They answered the call by fighting as they had not previously been known to fight.

Thirdly, the Irish now had an army that had shown itself capable, at least in certain circumstances, of facing the soldiers of the Queen. New military forces that were in effect national militias had arisen in the wake of feudalism and with the passing of the great age of mercenary service all over western Europe. The Queen's army, which was the national militia of England, was the first organised English army in the modern sense. Partly volunteer, partly conscript, equipped for the first time with firearms on the contemporary Continental scale, it was a force which was, in organisation, armament and numbers, infinitely more powerful than any earlier English army. To oppose it Hugh O'Neill, aided by his allies, had created a national militia of his own. He had done this, as has already been said, largely by an extension-it was in fact a transformation-of the Irish scheme of bonnaght, or the service of billeted men. The Ulster army was organised, equipped and trained to a degree hitherto quite unknown in the Gaelic areas.

Fourthly - and this too has been more than once mentioned - the Irish were successful because they had adopted a method of warfare that perfectly suited their traditions as fighters and the terrain over which they fought; a method, moreover, that was in full conformity with the pattern of diplomacy and strategy practised by O'Neill and his allies.

The strategy of the Ulstermen was, up to the date of the battle of Kinsale, purely defensive. At no time had they sought out with intent to attack it a main force of their enemies that was not already seeking them, or carrying out an operation of aggression against them. They had not tried to wrest the initiative from the English. On the contrary, they were content to hold their ground in Ulster; they awaited attack and met it when it came. This generalisation is not disturbed by the fact that the Irish continually raided the English districts, or those of English sympathy. O'Donnell marched more than once into Connacht and O'Neill marched into Munster in 1600. Successful efforts were made to stir up war in the midlands and in the south. But these operations never amounted to an assumption of the offensive.

O'Neill may have hoped, at least in the early stages, that if he prolonged this defensive struggle he might undermine the Queen s resolution to continue the fight, a fight that was becoming increasingly costly for her. If he did, his hope must have recede after 1600 when Mountjoy, who was the best general of the war, entered the lists against him. By then the Queen's ire had been thoroughly aroused. The reality of the Irish war as a desperate struggle with a skilful enemy had been brought home to English men; for the first time they declared their determination to 'wade through seas of Irish blood' to establish their dominion. When Mountjoy deployed in full the resources of England the Irish recipe for victory began to weaken in its effect. Mountjoy was no Burgh and no Essex. He was too wise to let the Irish cajole him back to the 'dallying times of their deluding parlies' - as Barnaby Rich called the early years of the war-too imaginative to permit another Yellow Ford. He profited by the mistakes of his predecessors.

It must have been clear at the beginning of 1601 that, if further help was not forthcoming from Spain and if the Queen lived long enough to see Mountjoy's work carried through, O'Neill and the Ulstermen would be defeated by the overpowering weight of their enemies' resources. O'Neill's survival was at stake; every thing depended on his ability to keep his forces in the held until foreign help arrived. And he was successful in doing so. Mountjoy and his lieutenants, Carew in Munster and Docwra in Derry, had reduced him by the summer of 1601 from the height of his power, but they had not driven him to extremities; Kinsale, when it came to be fought, opened more as a battle of desperation for the English than for the Irish.

Hitherto O'Neill and his supporters had won their battles by a brilliant process of luring their unimaginative enemy into positions where they could fight with the odds in their favour. But O'Neill was general enough to know that when the aid arrived which he had been importuning from Spain he must be ready to second it by an aggressive campaign involving at least the risk of a formal encounter with his foe. Clearly he must meanwhile make every effort to organise and train his men, so that, when the testing time arrived, as few as possible of the odds would be against him.

There are many indications of O'Neill's awareness of these matters. We know that he did all that he could to modernise his troops. A Scots observer explained that he 'did train his men and order the war by marshal discipline by reason of his experience and education amongst the English'. He trained pikemen. The pike, which as we know was new then even in the Queen's army, was essentially a close formation weapon, the chief - almost the sole-purpose of which in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the provision of the solidity that was necessary to deliver heavy blows and to resist shock in the pitched battles of formal warfare. When O'Neill was making ready for his march from Ulster to Kinsale to join the Spaniards in the early winter of 1601 it was reported of him that he had 'cast most of his companies into colours and drums [that is, that he had given them company colours and drums] according to the English fashion, and hath created officers of the field, as marshal and provost marshal'. This was an assumption of forms designed not for war as it had been waged in past times by the Irish but for manoeuvre and conflict in the open field.

The Irish appeal to Spain was pressed ever more vigorously as time advanced. In June 1600 the Spanish court was told that the Ulstermen were hemmed in between two hostile armies - that is, Mountjoy's and Docwra's - and that they were 'exhausted and impoverished'; if they had the assistance of 6,000 Spaniards, however, and if these forces were equipped with heavy guns, the Irish 'could take any city in Ireland'. By August 'the enemy's strength grows daily and our people are losing courage, seeing succour delayed'. O'Neill believed that he could hold out until September, but no longer. He had carried on the war for six years and had now neither food for his men nor money to pay them. Still, even in October, with 6,000 or 7,000 Spaniards and heavy guns 'we shall be masters of the kingdom'.

taken from the Appletree Press title Irish Battles by G.A. Hayes-McCoy.

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