Nine Years' War (Ireland)

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Nine Years War (Ireland)
Date 1594- 1603 Location Ireland Result English victory Flight of the Earls
Belligerents
Alliance of Irish Chiefs under Hugh O'Neill, lead from Ulster	England Allied Irish lords
Commanders
Hugh O'Neill Hugh Roe O'Donnell	Earl of Essex Lord Mountjoy
Strength
8,000 men in Ulster at the start of the war. Thousands more followed later. 9000 in rebellion in Munster, 1598-1601 3,500 Spanish soldiers in 1601	approx 5-6,000 up to 1598, c. 17,000 1598 to 1603
Casualties and losses
c.100,000 Irish civilian and military deaths	c. 30,000 soldiers though more died of disease than battle Hundreds of English planters

The Nine Years War ( Irish: Cogadh na Naoi mBliana) in Ireland took place from 1594 to 1603 and is also known as Tyrone's Rebellion. It was fought between the forces of Gaelic Irish chieftains Hugh O'Neill, 2nd Earl of Tyrone, Hugh Roe O'Donnell and their allies, against the Elizabethan English government of Ireland. The war was fought in all parts of the country, but primarily in the northern province of Ulster. It ended in defeat for the Irish chieftains, which led ultimately to their exile in the Flight of the Earls and to the Plantation of Ulster. It is not to be confused with the Nine Years War of the 1690s, part of which was also fought in Ireland.

Causes

The Nine Years War was caused by the collision between the ambition of the Gaelic Irish chieftain Hugh O’Neill and the advance of the English state in Ireland, from control over the Pale to ruling the whole island. In resisting this advance, O’Neill managed to rally other Irish septs who were dissatisfied with English government and some of those Catholics who opposed the spread of Protestantism in Ireland.

The rise of Hugh O’Neill

Hugh O'Neill came from the powerful O’Neill sept (or clan) of Tyrone, who dominated that centre of the northern province of Ulster . His father was killed and he was banished from Ulster as a child by Shane O'Neill. He was brought up in the Pale and was sponsored by the English authorities as a reliable lord. In 1587, he persuaded Elizabeth I to make him Earl of Tyrone (or Tir Eoin), the English title his father had held. However the real power in Ulster lay not in the legal title of Earl of Tyrone, but in the position of The O’Neill, or chief of the sept of O’Neill, then held by Turlough Luineach O'Neill. It was this position that commanded the obedience of all the O’Neills and their dependants in central Ulster; in 1595, after much bloodshed, Hugh O’Neill managed to secure it for himself.

Within the O’Neill territory he tied the peasantry to the land, making them effectively serfs and pressing them into military service. From Red Hugh O'Donnell, his ally, he took a supply of Scottish mercenaries (known as Redshanks). He also hired large contingents of Irish mercenaries known as buanadha under leaders such as Richard Tyrell. To arm his soldiers, O'Neill bought muskets, ammunition and pikes from Scotland and England. From 1591, O’Donnell, on O’Neill’s behalf, had been in contact with Phillip II of Spain, appealing for military aid against their common enemy and citing also their shared Catholicism. With the aid of Spain, O Neill was able to arm and feed over 8000 men, unprecedented for a Gaelic lord, and so was well prepared to resist any English attempts to govern Ulster.

Government advances into Ulster

By the early 1590’s, the north of Ireland was attracting the attention of Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam, who had been charged with bringing the area under crown control. A provincial presidency was proposed; the candidate for office was Henry Bagenal, an English colonist settled in Newry, who would seek to impose the authority of the crown through sheriffs to be appointed by the Dublin government. O’Neill had eloped with Bagenal’s sister, Mabel, and married her against her brother's wishes; the bitterness of this episode was made more intense after Mabel's early death a few years after the marriage, when she was clearly in despair from her husbands's neglect and the jealousy of his mistresses.

In 1591, Fitzwilliam broke up the MacMahon lordship in Monaghan when The MacMahon, hereditary leader of the sept, resisted the imposition of an English sheriff; he was hanged and his lordship divided. There was an outcry, with several sources alleging corruption against Fitzwilliam, but the same policy was soon applied in Longford (territory of the O’Farrells) and Breifne ( Cavan — territory of the O’Reillys). Any attempt to further the same in the O’Neill and O’Donnell territories was bound to be resisted by force of arms.

The most significant difficulty for English forces in confronting O’Neill lay in the natural defences that Ulster enjoyed. By land there were only two viable points of entry to the province for troops marching from the south: at Newry in the east, and Sligo in the west — the terrain in between was largely mountains, woodland, bog and marshes. Sligo Castle was held by the O’Connor sept, but suffered constant threat from the O’Donnels; the route from Newry into the heart of Ulster ran through several easily defended passes and could only be maintained in wartime with a punishing sacrifice by the Crown of men and money.

The English did have a foothold within Ulster, around Carrickfergus north of Belfast Lough, where a small colony had been planted in the 1570s; but here too the terrain was unfavourable for the English, since Lough Neagh and the river Bann, the lower stretch of which ran through the dense forest of Glenconkyne, formed an effective barrier on the eastern edge of the O’Neill territory. A further difficulty lay in the want of a port on the northern sea coast where the English might launch an amphibious attack into O’Neill's rear. The English strategic situation was complicated by interference from Scots clans, which were supplying O’Neill with soldiers and materials and playing upon the English need for local assistance, while keeping an eye to their own territorial influence in the Route (modern County Antrim).

War Breaks Out

In 1592 Red Hugh O'Donnell had driven an English sheriff, Captain Willis, out of his territory, Tir Connell. In 1593, Maguire and O’Donnell had combined to resist Willis’ introduction as Sheriff into Maguire’s Fermanagh and begun attacking the English outposts along the southern edge of Ulster. Initially O’Neill assisted the English, hoping to be named as Lord President of Ulster himself. Elizabeth I, though, had feared that O’Neill had no intention of being a simple landlord. Rather, his ambition was to usurp her sovereignty and be, "a Prince of Ulster". For this reason she refused to grant O’Neill provincial presidency or any other position which would have given him authority to govern Ulster on the crown’s behalf. Once it became clear that Henry Bagenal was marked to assume the presidency of Ulster, O’Neill accepted that an English offensive was inevitable, and so joined his allies in open rebellion in 1595 with an attack on the English fort on the Blackwater river.

Irish victory at Yellow Ford

The English authorities in Dublin Castle were slow to comprehend the depth of the rebellion. After failed negotiations in 1596, English armies tried to break into Ulster but were repulsed by a trained army including musketeers in prepared positions; after a stinging defeat at the Battle of Clontibret, successive English offensives were driven back in the following years. At the battle of the Yellow Ford in 1598 up to 2000 English troops were killed in battle having been ambushed on the march to Armagh. The rest were surrounded in Armagh itself but negotiated safe passage for themselves in return for evacuating the town. O Neill's personal enemy, Henry Bagenal, had been in command of the army and was killed during the early engagements. It was the heaviest defeat ever suffered by the English army in Ireland up to that point.

The victory prompted uprisings all over the country, with the assistance of mercenaries in O'Neill's pay and contingents from Ulster, and it is at this point that the war developed in its full force. Hugh O’Neill appointed his supporters as chieftains and earls around the country, notably James Fitzthomas Fitzgerald as the Earl of Desmond and Florence MacCarthy as the MacCarthy Mór. In Munster as many as 9000 men came out in rebellion. The Munster Plantation, the colonisation of the province with English settlers, was utterly destroyed, the colonists, among them Edmund Spenser, fled for their lives.

Only a handful of native lords remained consistently loyal to the crown and even these found their kinsmen and followers defecting to the rebels. However all the fortified cities and towns of the country sided with the English colonial government. Hugh O’Neill, unable to take walled towns, made repeated overtures to inhabitants of the Pale to join his rebellion, appealing to their Catholicism and to their alienation from the Dublin government and the provincial administrations. For the most part, however, the Old English remained hostile to their hereditary Gaelic enemies.

The Earl of Essex’s command

In 1599, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex arrived in Ireland with over 17,000 English troops. He took the advice of the Irish privy council, to settle the south of the country with garrisons before making an attempt on Ulster, but this dissipated his forces and he ended up suffering numerous setbacks on a desultory progress through south Leinster and Munster. Those expeditions he did organise were disastrous, especially an expedition crossing the Curlew mountains to Sligo, which was mauled by O’Donnell at the Battle of Curlew Pass. Thousands of his troops, shut up in unsanitary garrisons, died of diseases such as typhoid and dysentery.

When he did to turn to Ulster, Essex entered a parley with O Neill and agreed a truce that was heavily criticised by his enemies in London. Anticipating a recall to England, he set out for London in 1599 without the Queen's permission, where he was executed after attempting a court putsch. He was succeeded in Ireland by Lord Mountjoy, who proved to be a far more able commander. Two veterans of Irish warfare, George Carew and Arthur Chichester, were given commands in Munster and Ulster respectively.

The end of the rebellion in Munster

Carew managed more or less to quash the rebellion in Munster by mid 1601, using a mixture of conciliation and force. By the summer of 1601 he had retaken most of the principal castles in Munster and scattered the rebel forces. Fitzthomas and Florence MacCarthy were arrested and kept captive in the Tower of London, where both eventually died. Most of the rest of the local lords submitted once O’Neills mercenaries had been expelled from the province.

The Battle of Kinsale and the Collapse of the Rebellion

Mountjoy managed to penetrate the interior of Ulster by sea-borne landings at Derry (then belonging to County Coleraine) under Henry Dowcra and Carrickfergus under Arthur Chichester. Dowcra and Chichester, helped by Niall Garbh O’Donnell, a rival of Red Hugh, devastated the countryside in an effort to provoke a famine and killed the civilian population at random. Their military assumption was that without crops and people, the rebels could neither feed themselves nor raise new fighters. This attrition quickly began to bite, and it also meant that the Ulster chiefs were tied down in Ulster to defend their own territories. Although O’Neill managed to repulse another land offensive by Mountjoy at the battle of Moyry Pass near Newry in 1600, his position was becoming desperate.

In 1601, the long promised Spanish expedition finally arrived in the form of 3500 soldiers at Kinsale, Cork, virtually the southern tip of Ireland. Mountjoy immediately besieged them with 7000 men. O’Neill, O’Donnell and their allies marched their armies south to sandwich Mountjoy, whose men were starving and wracked by disease, between them and the Spaniards. During the march south, O'Neill devastated the lands of those who would not support him. On the 5/6 January 1602, O’Neill and O’Donnell took the decision to attack the English. During a planned surprise attack the Irish lost the element of surprise and events were reduced to a series of pitched battles in which the Irish forces were routed in what became known as the battle of Kinsale.

The Irish forces retreated north to Ulster to regroup and consolidate their position. The Ulstermen lost many more men in the retreat through freezing and flooded country than they had at the actual battle of Kinsale. The last rebel stronghold in the south was taken at the Siege of Dunboy by George Carew. Red Hugh O'Donnell left for Spain, where he died in 1602, pleading in vain for another Spanish landing. His brother assumed leadership of the O'Donnell's. Both he and Hugh O’Neill were reduced to guerrilla tactics, fighting in small bands, as Mountjoy, Dowcra, Chichester and Niall Garbh O’Donnell swept the countryside.

The End of the War

Mountjoy smashed the O’Neill’s inauguration stone at Tullaghogue, symbolically destroying the O’Neill clan. Famine soon hit Ulster as a result of the English scorched earth strategy. Chichester’s forces found that the locals were reduced to cannibalism. O’Neill’s uirithe or sub-lords (O’Hagan, O’Quinn, MacCann) began to surrender and Rory O'Donnell surrendered on terms at the end of 1602. However, with a secure base in the large and dense forests of Tir Eoin, O’Neill held out until 30 March 1603, when he surrendered on good terms to Mountjoy. Elizabeth I had died a week before.

Aftermath

The rebels received surprisingly good terms from the new King of England James I, at the end of the war. O’Neill, O’Donnell and the other surviving Ulster chiefs were granted full pardons and the return of their estates. The stipulations were that they abandon their Irish titles, their private armies, their control over their dependants and swear loyalty only to the Crown of England. In 1604, Mountjoy declared an amnesty for rebels all over the country. The reason for this apparent mildness was that the English could not afford to continue the war any longer. Elizabethan England did not have a standing army, nor could it force its Parliament to pass enough taxation to pay for long wars. Moreover, it was already involved in a war in the Spanish Netherlands. As it was, the war in Ireland (which cost over £2 million) came very close to bankrupting the English exchequer by its close in 1603.

Irish sources claimed that as many as 60,000 people had died in the Ulster famine of 1602–3 alone. Even if this is an exaggeration, counting the unknown number killed in battle or massacred, an Irish death toll of over 100,000 is possible. At least 30,000 English soldiers died in Ireland in the Nine Years War, mainly from disease. So the total death toll for the war was certainly at least 100,000 people,and probably more.

Although O’Neill and his allies got good terms at the end of the war, they were never trusted by the English authorities and the distrust was mutual. O’Neill, O’Donnell and the other Gaelic lords from Ulster left Ireland in 1607 in what is known as the Flight of the Earls. They intended to organise an expedition from a Catholic power in Europe to re-start the war, preferably Spain, but were unable to find any military backers. Spain had agreed peace in 1604 with the new Stuart dynasty, and had lost its fleet in the Battle of Gibraltar. Inevitably the absent earls' lands were confiscated for trying to start another war, and were soon colonised in the Plantation of Ulster. The Nine Years War was therefore an important step in the English and Scottish colonisation of Ulster.