The Ulster People:23, III The Modern Era – The Kingdom of Ireland.

Posted on August 11, 2016 by
Effective English control had eventually become confined to Dublin, founded by Danish invaders using the stolen wealth of British Dumbarton and British slaves,  and to an ever-shrinking area around it known as ‘the Pale’. Not only were the Irish chiefs beyond royal jurisdiction but many of the first Anglo-Norman settlers had become so assimilated into Irish life — indeed, becoming ‘more Irish than the Irish’ — that their loyalty was increasingly suspect. Henry VIII had become the first King, rather than Lord, of Ireland. So his daughter, Elizabeth I set out to rectify this unacceptable state of affairs. As Robert Kee pointed out: “Her deputies in Ireland were Englishmen newly appointed from England, and no longer those old Norman-English Irish lords who had so often proved to be simply their own masters in the past. Force ‘when necessity requireth’ was applied equally against the Old English and the Gaelic Irish, with unprecedented savagery”. Irish opposition to this new stage of the English ‘conquest’ was strongest in Ulster.
 The two ruling clans, the O’Neills and O’Donnells, were involved in a serious rebellion from 1594 to 1601. In 1594 Hugh O’Donnell opened the rebellion by defeating an English army at the ‘Ford of the Biscuits’, with O’Neill joining him the following year. In May 1595 Sir Henry Bagenal, on his way back from relieving the English outpost of Monaghan, was ambushed at Clontibret and suffered heavy losses. In 1598 O’Neill and O’Donnell dramatically defeated Bagenal at the Yellow Ford, to the south of Lough Neagh. This defeat, which inspired risings in other parts of Ireland, shook the new English government to its foundations.

The English recovered and in 1601 under Mountjoy they finally broke the Gaelic rebellion at Kinsale, after O’Neill had been forced to leave his familiar Ulster territory to link up with a Spanish force which had landed in the south of Ireland. On 4 September, 1607, after continued harassment by Crown officials, many of Ulster’s Gaelic chieftains, including the Earls of Tyrone and Tirconnell, chose voluntary exile and sailed from Rathmullan for Europe. Most of their tenants would have been glad to see them go. This ‘Flight of the Earls’ gave the English government the opportunity to declare their lands forfeit, and some 750,000 acres were confiscated by the Crown.

When the Ulster chieftains fought against the English they were not fighting ‘for Ireland’ in the modern nationalistic sense but in their own interests and to preserve their ancient Gaelic way of life. The very idea of a republican form of government would have been repugnant to the old Irish system of law. In his Life of Hugh O’Neill (1845) the Young Irelander John Mitchel pointed out that: “Furthermore there was, in the 16th century, no Irish nation. Save the tie of a common language, the chieftain of Clan Connal (O’Donnell) had no more connection with the Lord of Clan Carrha (Cork), than either one had with the English Pale. The Anglo-Norman colony was regarded as one of the independent tribes of the island.”

It was at this time that a new provincial configuration of Ireland was effected with four ‘provinces’ divided up into counties. The eastern part of the Kingdom of Breffny (Cavan) was taken from Connaught and placed artificially in Ulster while the northern part of Louth, which had been one of the most ancient parts of Ulster, known originally as Muirtheimne and defended by the legendary hero Cúchulainn, was taken from Ulster and placed artificially into Leinster. The older boundaries were, however, remembered well into the 17th century. It is ironic that today staunch Irish nationalists have lost sight of that ancient demarcation, and instead speak of the new 9 County configuration drawn up by the Queen of England and Ireland’s administrators as if it had existed from time immemorial.

To be continued

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