It is August, 1598, and after five years of war,
the English Crown’s attempts to conquer the Irish province of Ulster are at a dismal low.
While the Crown’s presence in Ireland dates back to the Norman invasions of the 12th
century, by the time of the Tudor regime, the Irish lords have beaten the once dominant
English-controlled areas back to the confines of Dublin, the area known as “the Pale,”
with everything beyond it under the rule of local Gaelic or Hiberno-Norman chieftains.
Starting with the reign of Mary I in the 1550s, the English government has attempted to use
a policy of colonial plantation to bring recalcitrant areas under control, and it was the
threat of these efforts at population transfer that pushed the northernmost lords of Ulster, Hugh
Roe O’Donnell of Tyrconnell, and Hugh O’Neill of Tyrone, into outright rebellion.
Like many of the Gaelic lords, O’Neill and O’Donnell had courted the Crown
authorities, paying lip service to Queen Elizabeth I’s authority, and their loyalty had been
effectively bought in return for inactivity.
But both O’Neill and O’Donnell were unwilling
in any degree to lose their ancient privileges and sovereignty in their domains, and it was
inevitable that the ongoing Tudor attempts to pacify and re-establish English control in Ireland
would eventually clash with their interests.
O’Donnell and other Gaelic clan chiefs like Hugh
Maguire had entered open war in the early 1590s, with the rumored support of O’Neill.
But when the Lord Deputy of Ireland, William Fitzwilliam, made public his wish for
Ulster to be transformed to a Anglicized shire system, under the governorship of Henry
Bagenal, an English settler with lands in Newry, O’Neill too came out in defiant opposition.
Bagenal and O’Neill had a history together, for O’Neill had eloped with Bagenal’s
sister, Mabel, and it is likely that the English colonialist welcomed the chance to finally
subdue the unruly and independent Irish lord.
But the duo’s first joust in May 1595 took
all of the Crown government in Ireland, the royal Court in London, and most
of all, Bagenal himself by surprise.
While riding to reinforce the garrison at Monaghan
Castle, then under siege by the Confederate Irish, Bagenal’s army of almost eighteen hundred
men were fired on by Irish forces, likely numbering in the hundreds, and the
resulting engagement lasted for four hours.
Casualties were few however, and ambushes
were common in the wilds of Ulster.
Bagenal was satisfied that the skirmish
had shown that his army was superior to any Gaelic contingent in the province.
His army lifted the siege of Monaghan town and resupplied the defenders,
providing them with reinforcements.
The next day, content that the Irish
forces had withdrawn from the area, Bagenal moved his force east to Newry.
It had traveled barely 5 miles, passing near the village of Clontibret - a countryside
dotted with low drumlins, ideal for the concealment of large bodies of troops, as well
as woods and marshy bogs. Then, another ambush, far exceeding the first in intensity, rained
gunfire down on the complacent column.
Bagenal’s English force was caught in a
murderous crossfire from three directions, the front and both sides of the trail, and
his pike infantry, musketeers, and cavalry were sliced through in equal measure.
Seeing that the Irish fired in rapid, precisely aimed salvos, using both
caliver arquebuses and modern muskets, was an appalling revelation
to the column’s commander.
From his position in the ditch, Bagenal saw
the figure of O’Neill astride his horse, watching the proceedings as his clansmen and
allies tore holes in the invader’s companies.
The smell of powder and terrified
screams filled the air.
Bagenal’s entire force was in danger of
annihilation and hundreds were already dead.
Only a heroic action by an English
cavalry cornet named Sedgrave saved the lives of the relief column.
Sedgrave mustered and led a mounted charge of 40 men at O’Neill’s position, taking
the Gaelic leader and his companies by surprise, and lifting the attention of the Irish from
the main body of the column momentarily.
Bagenal was able to get the greater part of
his surviving units racing toward shelter, while Sedgrave managed to reach O’Neill himself
and grab the Irish leader by the neck.
It was a brave but suicidal action, for one
of O’Neill’s bodyguards by the name of O’Cahan severed the Englishman’s arm and O’Neill
himself stabbed Sedgrave in the groin.
Sedgrave had saved Bagenal with his
sacrifice, but on his way back to Newry, the general and the rest of the English
administration came to a sobering realization.
Half of Bagenal’s host lay dead, and O’Neill had
attacked it with an army of 4,000 men - twice the size of Bagenal’s original relief army.
Not only that, but O’Neill’s men had stood and fought with modern firearms, discharged
at a steady, practiced rate of fire, as well as ruinous accuracy.
The Chief of Tyrone had, in short, created a modern field army in the depths
of Ulster, and after decades of turmoil and near extinction, the English colonization of
Ireland now faced an unprecedented menace.
Medieval Gaelic armies were traditionally manned
by a mixture of galloglass - armored axe and swordsmen, predominantly of Scots Gaelic
origin - and kerne - Irish infantrymen who were lightly armored and carried spears and
sword, along with a bow and short knife.
The shared culture between the Scots
and Irish meant that inter-marriage was relatively common and galloglass
were often given as part of a dowry.
By the time that Hugh O’Neill had
taken power in Tyrconnell, firearms had been known in Ireland for centuries, but the
galloglass-kerne armies remained predominant.
This began to change toward the end of the
16th century, but one of the more dramatic accelerants in Irish military culture was
the failure of the Spanish Armada in 1588.
After around 20 to 30 of Philip II’s ships
broke or landed on the west coast of Ireland, many of the sailors and army personnel
who attempted to find shelter were killed, but the more enterprising Gaelic lords
defied the English directive to execute every Spaniard, and instead took them on
as captains to train their own armies.
O’Neill even went so far as to foster
contacts with the Spanish government of his fellow Catholic Philip II as well
as making use of Spanish expertise in the pike and shot armies of modern warfare.
Along with receiving Spanish supplies and advisors, he also bought large amounts of
gunpowder and firearms from the Kingdom of Scotland, and established an armaments
factory at his base in Dungannon.
As an ostensible vassal of the English
crown before the rebellion, O’Neill was limited in the number of armed retainers
he could employ in his household guard.
He conveniently sidestepped this limit by
operating a system of rotation among his soldiery, effectively conscripting his feudal retainers
for a limited time - training them in the use of weaponry - and then calling up a
new allocation some months later.
His army also incorporated cavalry,
with capable riders, but Gaelic cavalry operated more as a reconnaissance and
skirmishing arm than a concentrated body making use of devastating charges.
Similarly, targeteers – which were infantrymen armed with sword and shield - were used by O’Neill
as a human shield to protect his musketeers, but they lacked the ability to mount an attack
of such destructive impact as galloglass.
O’Neill’s military strategy depended on
mobility, the capacity to move quickly about the inhospitable terrain of his province
and enact shattering attacks on his larger and less mobile opponents, before withdrawing swiftly
to the security of the landscape once more.
By opening up his recruitment levy
to all members of Gaelic society, he also created an unprecedented pool of reserves
who could be drawn on with the advent of war.
Combined with the substantial incomes he
made from his holdings and clan affiliations, O’Neill had an income of £80,000 pounds a
year and a potential field army of 8,000, roughly the same size as the army that
Elizabeth I’s grandfather Henry VII had used to seize the English throne at the
Battle of Bosworth a century earlier.
Famously, O’Neill also took abundant deliveries
of lead from England prior to the conflict, stating that it was for the roof
of his castle, but in reality, his smiths turned the lead into bullets.
O’Neill’s rebellion and victory at Clontibret left the English government in a nightmare scenario.
Ulster was only accessible to a field army at two points: Bagenal’s base in Newry to the
east and Sligo in the west. All of the countryside between was either heavily
forested, mountainous, or bog wetlands.
The Sligo pass was very heavily protected by
O’Donnell, while Newry too provided abundant drumlin country and narrow points
in which to conceal an ambush.
A single positive for the Crown forces were
the small fortified colonies at Belfast and Carrickfergus, each occupied by a few hundred
men and providing the potential for an amphibious landing on the Foyle River, thus limiting
O’Neill’s abilities to move out of Ulster.
In the southeast, Thomas Butler,
the Earl of Ormond and Ossory, remained with his distant cousin Elizabeth’s
cause, but it was the Crown in any case that was forced to operate on a number of fronts.
The Wicklow rebel, Fiach MacHugh O’Byrne, who had defeated a large English host at Glenmalure
in 1580, also joined the confederacy and followed up with raids and attacks on the south eastern
areas of Carlow, Laois, Kilkenny, and Wexford.
Even the suburbs of the Pale like
Crumlin were soon put to waste.
Meanwhile, the southwestern province of Munster had only been pacified and planted with
English colonists in the previous decade. The confiscated Irish land was often
sold at just a few pence per acre.
Naturally, those displaced were hostile
to the occupation of their ancestral home, and the Dublin administration knew as a
result that Munster was also a powder keg.
It was only at the start of the 1597 campaigning
season that the Crown administration felt secure enough to mount an expedition in
force at O’Neill’s Ulster stronghold.
Newly appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland,
Thomas Burgh advanced north with an army of fifteen hundred men, including
300 cavalry, moving from Newry on the 12th July toward the town of Armagh.
His objective was to devastate the lands of Tyrone and clear the English forts
at the Foyle for a future advance.
After passing through Armagh Town, however, he
found that O’Neill had built a fortification over the Blackwater.
It was a timber structure, and Burgh managed to clear it after a sharp
exchange. He advanced to the western bank, but confederate forces skirmished for the area,
making use of the caliver arquebus. Ultimately, Burgh was unable to make further progress.
Instead, he constructed a new fort, fighting off confederate attacks, before withdrawing to
deal with threats from rebels in the midlands.
Burgh’s garrison managed to hold the
Blackwater through the use of cannon, though they were hard pressed. But Burgh’s
death from typhus mid-way through October was another blow to the Crown forces.
O’Neill immediately sent reinforcements to his Leinster allies to threaten the Pale, and turned
away from the Blackwater to raid Carrickfergus.
Half of the garrison there perished, and the
head of the commander, Sir John Chichester, was taken by O’Neill’s forces.
A truce over the winter and spring allowed both sides some respite, but the
garrison on the Blackwater remained besieged.
An English plan for the long awaited amphibious
landing in the Foyle was discovered by O’Neill and hostilities resumed at the end of June, 1598.
By this time, Bagenal had received reinforcements from England and he was fervent in taking
the role as O’Neill’s nemesis once more.
Bagenal and his force of 3,500
infantry and 350 cavalry departed Armagh Town on the morning of the 14th August.
The army was split into three sections for the march, with the cavalry divided between
the vanguard and the rear echelon.
Bagenal was positioned in this section, along
with the army’s supply wagons and its artillery.
Each section was then divided again into
two regiments - six in total - and Bagenal appears to have moved between the rear
and the middle in the early morning.
The column possessed four artillery pieces,
one of which was a large two and a half to 3,000 pound cannon, referred to as a saker.
Sakers were de rigueur in continental armies, and their utility in set piece
battles and siege were self-evident.
They were not however suited to the boggy,
soft ground that lay between Armagh Town and the Blackwater Fort, even in the pleasant August
late summer, and Bagenal’s piece began to sink and necessitate general stops almost as soon
as the column started its four mile journey.
The hindrance was compounded
when it broke a wheel.
Two Captains, Percy and Cosby, commanded the
vanguard of the English army, while two others named Leigh and Turner led a detached group at
the very spearpoint of the column, projecting an air of confidence as they smoked their pipes
while riding in the agreeable morning breeze.
Bagenal’s second, Sir Thomas Maria Wingfield,
commanded the middle regiments, and at the outset of the march, the three main sections were to be
divided by a distance of about a hundred yards.
Captains Billings and Cuney
had command of the rear.
The trail to the Blackwater was lined with scrub
forest almost as soon as the environs of Armagh ended, and the column came under fire from
Irish skirmishers after just a half a mile.
The fire was heavy enough to motivate the
advance company to press forward, but not so heavy as to compel its leaders to call for
a halt to the march and engage the attackers.
Sir Thomas Percy leading the vanguard
was particularly agitated to continue the march and move at a faster pace, but the
baggage and artillery were unable to keep up, particularly the saker, and in any case, the
vast majority of the English army was composed of pikemen with musketeers posted in an
outer ring to provide defensive fire.
Bagenal’s force also made use of what was
called “loose shot,” groups of three to four musketeers who operated about forty yards out on
the main column’s flank, engaging the Irish ambush parties and attempting to keep them at a safe
distance for the army to continue its march.
Nevertheless, a combination of Percy’s impatience,
the constant harassment from confederate forces, and the snail’s pace of the artillery and baggage
at the rear meant that the three main sections of the army became further and further detached
from one another as the morning continued.
O’Neill had further aggravated Bagenal’s passage
by felling trees and digging pits in the road, which compelled the English ranks to move off
and take to the increasing number of drumlins to the side, moving them to higher ground where
they were choice targets for Irish calivers.
Casualties were still light when the advance
section crossed the Callan River, an easy task for infantry in the season, as the river was
little more than a trickling stream, though the ground around it was particularly soft.
From there, Percy led his men northwest across the drumlins and then to a pair of hills, the second
of which was under a mile from the Blackwater River and the fort on the far side.
Though Percy was unaware at the time, the baggage and artillery had become mired
at the Callan, the marshy flood plain giving way like butter under the wheel of wagons and
especially the three thousand pound saker.
Keen to escape the relentless, prickling fire
of the Irish ambush parties, Percy went over the hill and then made a singular discovery.
O’Neill’s forces had dug a wide trench in the valley between the two hills, reaching a
mile in either direction, and then used the displaced soil to create an earthwork rampart
on its far side, topped with impediments - sharp brambles and thorny branches.
After approaching this barrier cautiously and finding that there were no guards on the other
side, Percy’s regiments came under heavy fire from the flanks once more, their loose shot unable
to counter the opposing numbers, and he gave the order to cross the trench and embankment.
It was a difficult and painful ordeal, as the rate of fire from the Irish
increased while the pikemen and musketeers struggled to get past the obstacles.
Bagenal’s cavalry found the trench and barriers completely impassable
and were unable to move forward.
Remaining defiant, the vanguard passed the
obstruction and crested another hill.
From this vantage point, the Blackwater Fort
and its defenders were visible, and the garrison began cheering at the sight of Percy’s company.
By this time, however, Bagenal’s army was strung out in three different locations: the artillery
and baggage were still caught at the River Callan, the middle section was at the hill just before
the trench, and Percy’s command was highly exposed on the next hill just before the Blackwater.
The attacks from the Confederates had continued unceasingly, and Percy found himself both furious
with the rest of the army for not keeping pace and also alarmed by the fact that his loose shot
skirmishers had suddenly run out of ammunition.
They retreated to the cover of the pike ranks
and now, O’Neill’s men closed in force and were freely able to fire on Percy’s regiments
from a distance of ten or fifteen meters, or just under fifty feet.
Worse, Bagenal sent word from the middle section that Percy was to
return to the main body of the army.
As the two regiments of the vanguard came about
and attempted to go back the way they had come, disorder was inevitable and the Irish
saw that their opportunity had arrived.
After another devastating round of fire,
targeteers and horsemen swept onto the back of the English army, emerging from nowhere,
cutting them down and starting a general rout.
The trench and thorny obstacles on top of
the earthwork that had been mysteriously undefended when Percy arrived now acted as
the gate of a trap, pinning the greater part of Percy’s regiments in place, while those at
the front fought to flee and fell into the pit, only to be trampled, crushed and suffocated
by the hundreds who fell in after them.
Riding to the front, the full calamity
of O’Neill’s scheme and the unfolding slaughter became apparent to Bagenal.
While he had thought his army of near 4,000 men invulnerable to hit and run attacks,
O’Neill had put together a force of 5,000, drawing on his ally O’Donnell and other clans
from Connaught, luring Bagenal and his captains like livestock onto a killing ground.
Bagenal was moving down to the trench, attempting to bring some kind of order as well as
reinforcement to Percy’s swiftly disintegrating regiments, when he raised the visor of his helm
and was immediately shot through the face.
Their leader gone, Bagenal’s regiments
blocked those of Percy’s retreating ranks and the confusion became manifold.
Those coming back over the trench were stepping on the corpses of their comrades, only to run
into their newly arrived support and every one of them fell into a hopeless tangle.
The Confederates were still firing from the sides while O’Neill’s cavalry and
targeteers were finishing off the regiments that were on top of the third hill.
Wingfield took command and attempted to exert control, even perhaps rally a
counter attack to press on to the fort.
Once a threadbare order was reestablished
at the trench, two units from the middle company actually passed over it and started
to engage the Irish on the far side.
The four pieces of artillery also appear
to have come into range and been put to use by their operators.
Another of the regiments, likely from the third army section, was in the
process of crossing the barrier and Wingfield appeared to be salvaging something from the
debacle, when an unnamed soldier attempted to replenish his supply of gunpowder and
inadvertently put his hand inside the barrel while still holding a match for his musket.
The resulting explosion ignited a number of other gunpowder barrels and masses of English
soldiers in the vicinity died instantly, others suffering grievous wounds.
While the survivors staggered and screamed in the aftermath, their sight
clouded by a blinding curtain of smoke, the Irish emerged again from the murk and began
attacking the remnants of the English lines.
Wingfield decided that the cause was lost and
with the supply wagons having finally cleared the River Callan only to come under immediate
attack and ruination from O’Neill forces, he gave the order to retreat.
The entire column reversed its direction, Wingfield overseeing the operation and
Cosby in command of the remnants of the vanguard, now forming a battered rear.
Wingfield’s attempts to keep command and stability in the face of the untiring attacks
were yet again thrown into turmoil when Cosby launched a bizarre counter attack at the Irish
forces pursuing the English behind the trench.
This necessitated Cosby to cross back over the
trench and the earthwork behind and his men were inexorably mauled and cut to pieces.
Wingfield was forced to lead a cavalry detachment back to cover hundreds of soldiers now
in danger, and Cosby himself was taken prisoner.
When Wingfield returned to the front of the
column, he found that O’Neill had led his own main forces laterally over the hills to try and
cut the English army off from the high ground, but the English artillery pieces kept them
from descending and Wingfield managed to work his army back over the Callan and on
to Armagh where they could find sanctuary.
Miraculously for him and his remaining
men, the Irish guns also fell silent, their own ammunition spent, and the column was
able to stumble into Armagh by the evening.
Thomas Percy, who had led his forward command
away from the main body of Bagenal’s forces, only to be eradicated on the hill before the
Blackwater, also survived, and he maintained to the end of his life that the fault lay with the
slow moving artillery and baggage sections.
On the Irish side, the shortcomings of
O’Neill’s military reforms became acute as Wingfield orchestrated his escape.
Both the Irish and the English army had run short of gunpowder, but O’Neill’s transformed
force was now overwhelmingly made up of infantry armed with caliver and arquebus.
Had O’Neill possessed a strong force of traditional galloglass, strong mobile
infantry that could have charged en masse, or a coordinated cavalry, he could have
destroyed the English army in its entirety.
As it was, the Irish victory was undeniably
total. More than half of Bagenal’s force was dead, wounded, or in case of hundreds of
Irish soldiers on the English side, gone over to the enemy. Some 300 were thought
to have deserted and joined the confederates.
Fully seven hundred of the survivors had
lost their weapons in the chaos of battle.
By contrast, O’Neill’s losses were just 200 men.
Advancing and surrounding the town, O’Neill threatened an attack on Armagh should
the English forces remain, and there was little that the defenders could do to contradict him.
Under terms agreed between the Confederates and the Crown, the Blackwater Fort
and Armagh were evacuated.
The destruction of the field
army sent reverberations around the court of Queen Elizabeth I.
While Munster came out in open rebellion in its wake, the Queen’s favorite, the Earl
of Essex arrived the next year with an army of 17,000, proclaiming to all that he was
the man who would bring O’Neill to account.
His campaign would flounder in even
worse circumstances than Bagenal’s.
Meanwhile, in Madrid, Philip II of Spain began
making plans to send his own army to Ireland, O’Neill’s success indicating that the Habsburg
monarchy had finally found the route to conquer the Protestant regime of England.
O’Neill’s war was only half finished.
