O’Neill, Hugh, Second Earl of Tyrone

As a result a devastating war broke between the rival contenders in the 1550s for control of Tyrone. Shane, in spite of the crown’s military support for his opponent, had Matthew killed in 1558, and on Conn’s death the following year succeeded to the Gaelic title of ‘O’Neill’. Hugh Dubh’s imprisonment was cut short by the intervention of the Spanish Ambassador to England, who argued that Hugh Dubh was a Spanish subject.

At the battle of Kinsale, a Spanish expedition to aid O’Neill and O’Donnell was defeated, ending their hopes of winning the war. O’Neill, O’Donnell and their allies marched their armies south in freezing December weather to sandwich Mountjoy, whose men were starving and wracked by disease, between them and the Spaniards. In 1601, the long-promised Spanish expedition finally arrived in the form of 3,500 soldiers at Kinsale, Cork, virtually the southern tip of Ireland.

By 1592, the year of the two Hugh’s victories in their respective succession conflicts, O’Neill’s alliances had hardened into a confederation of the northern Gaelic chiefs. Even more significantly, since 1591 O’Donnell had been communicating (at O’Neill’s request) with Phillip II of Spain for military aid against the English heretics. His Most Catholic Majesty duly supplied them with arms, money and military advisors. It was envisaged that Ulster would be governed by a provincial president – probably Henry Bagenel, an English colonist settled in Newry. The first subjects of the composition experiment in Ulster were in Longford, Cavan and Monaghan.

With up to half of Bagenal’s force of 4,000 dead at the Yellow Ford on 14 August 1598, O’Neill had achieved the greatest victory ever achieved by Irish arms against the English. However, we do not know what O’Neill’s own losses were; secondly, we know how inadequate his own forces were at siege warfare, having lost many trying unsuccessfully to dislodge a small English force from the earthen-ramparted fort in the heart of his own territory. Nevertheless the victory facilitated the spread of the revolt nationwide when in October Uaithne O’More (qv) and Richard Tyrrell (qv) marched into Munster to raise the disaffected and dispossessed there against the plantation.

Mary Maria Doughty o’Doughty, Doutheij, Douthey, van Der Donck, Doty

Hugh O’Donnell left for Spain, where he died in 1602, pleading in vain for another Spanish landing. 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 country, burning and killing as they went. Mountjoy smashed the O’Neill’s inauguration stone at Tullaghogue, symbolically destroying an order that had lasted for hundreds if not thousands of years.

The Irish, amid bitter recriminations among their leaders for the defeat, headed home to Ulster to defend their own lands. The Ulstermen lost many more men in the retreat through freezing and flooded country than they had at the actual battle of Kinsale. Eoghan O’Sullivan Beare held out in his territory in Kerry for several more months before fleeing for Ulster himself with his kinsmen and followers. It did not end the war and it did not by itself destroy Gaelic culture or the Gaelic aristocracy, but it decide the future outcome of the war and therefore of the English presence in Ireland.

O’Neills of Clanaboy

What was more, the MacMahon and O’Rourke chiefs had actually been hanged after their lordship was “reformed” and O’Reilly had been driven into exile. It was the threat that this settlement would be extended into his dominion that brought Hugh O’Neill into direct conflict with the English authorities. To the more devout, such as Red Hugh O’Donnell, English authority was not only the eclipse of his power, but also the eclipse of the One True Faith by heresy. The ensuing conflict, known to history as the Nine Years War, shook English rule in Ireland to its very foundations but ended with the final victory of the Tudor state over the old Gaelic order. Any speculation regarding the origins of the Hugh O’Neill allegedly born c.

For the next two years it is impossible to describe the state of Ireland as one either of peace or of war. Supplies of arms arrived from Spain, and on one occasion O’Neill forwarded to the Deputy the letter accompanying them. The entire English force in Ireland at the commencement of the war was 4,040 foot and 657 horse; but they were quickly reinforced, and the Lord-Deputy could always count on efficient aid from the Earl of Ormond and other Irish allies. The entire force the Ulster chiefs could put into the field was some 15,000 foot and 2,200 horse—for the most part irregular levies which it was all but impossible to keep together for any length of time. Mr. Richey inclines to the opinion that Hugh O’Neill rather drifted into the war than entered upon it with a preconceived purpose.

So the total death toll for the war may have been in the region of 150,000 people, if not more. Perhaps the only winners of the Nine Years War were the Spaniards, who, for a relatively small investment, tied down thousands of English troops, and bled their treasury dry. Not only that, but when the war was over, they began to reap a rich harvest of exiled Gaelic Irish nobles and their clan followers who gave over 80,000 men to the Spanish Army in the first half of the 17th century.

The Irish Franciscans welcomed the earls to Louvain; but the following spring the Spanish authorities, to avoid diplomatic difficulties with England, packed the fugitives off to Rome. There the earls were housed by the pope and lived on a stingy Spanish pension. In the summer of 1608 Ruaidhrí O’Donnell, his brother Caffar, and Hugh, baron of Dungannon, died of fever. Meanwhile his asylum was monitored by English spies and informers and beset by worsening relations with his former supporter, Peter Lombard (qv), the Old English archbishop of Armagh. Shane O’Neill (qv), Conn’s eldest legitimate son, objected to this arrangement, claiming that Matthew was not really an O’Neill at all, having been born Matthew Kelly in Dundalk and later affiliated to the O’Neill family by Conn at the age of fourteen.

Of O’Neill’s widowed Countess, Catherine Magennis, his fourth wife, little is known; she probably died in the Netherlands. Essex’s forces were wasted in his southern campaign, and his expedition against O’Neill resulted only in a personal interview at Aclint on the Lagan, on 7th August. After a contest lasting the whole forenoon, the English were utterly defeated. Marshal Bagnall, thirteen officers, and 1,500 soldiers were killed, according to English accounts, and the standards, arms, ammunition, and supplies were captured.

Hugh’s wardship formally ended when he sued out his livery in November 1567. By then Shane O’Neill had been removed from the scene by the skeans of the MacDonnells, and the Strabane-based Turlough Luineach had taken the opportunity to fill the vacuum he had left as O’Neill. That winter Sidney brought Hugh, the young baron of Dungannon, and other Irish lords to the court in London on a sort of triumph, and on his return he placed Hugh in the barony of Oneilland in Co.

Rise to power

By the end of the year the crown was forced to negotiate, and after much toing and froing between the Ulster borders, Dublin, and London, the confederates were being offered pardons, local autonomy, and informal tolerance of their religion. However, this compromise settlement was aborted by the arrival of Spanish agents in May 1596. Instead, after a meeting at Lifford, O’Neill and O’Donnell requested a Spanish army to liberate them and a Habsburg prince to rule over them. Of Austrian descent, von Hügel inherited his father’s baronial title in 1870 but lived most of his life (1876–1925) in England, where he married a sister of the 13th earl of Pembroke and, at the outbreak of World War I, assumed British citizenship (1914). Mary and Adriaen had no children, and so, without an heir, she signed over their vast estate to her brother, who sold it.

In fact the earl had offered to spare Gavelach if the rest of the MacShanes submitted to his rule; when an agreement was not forthcoming, he was hanged at Dungannon by the public executioners of Tyrone. The earl had also refused to hand over Gavelach to the authorities in Dublin. Capt. Thomas Lee (qv) later alleged that the earl had won the acquiescence of Lord Deputy William Fitzwilliam (qv) with ‘a great bribe’.

When it was once inevitable, he acted with the greatest prudence towards his neighbours, welding them into a confederacy of those who had suffered wrongs at the hands of the Government. After the death of his second wife, daughter of MacManus O’Donnell, Hugh won the heart of a beautiful English girl, sister of Marshal Bagnall. At the Treaty of Mellifont in 1603, O’Neill, O’Donnell and the other surviving Ulster chiefs received full pardons and the return of their estates.

Fynes Moryson (qv) in his History of the rebellion of the earl of Tirone recorded that ‘the name of O’Neill is so revered in the north as none could be induced to betray him upon the large reward set upon his head’. In the same way that Moryson overdramatised the difficulties of the English army at Kinsale, so too did he overemphasise the significance of Mountjoy’s keeping the news of Elizabeth’s death secret from O’Neill. In fact, O’Neill’s submission at Mellifont was not an abject surrender but a matter of negotiation which Mountjoy was keen to accelerate in case news of the death leaked out. Having received concessions, O’Neill renounced foreign alliances, the name of O’Neill and control of the uirríthe. Later he travelled to London, where he was received favourably by King James.

Subsequent generations and kings made their own modifications resulting in the current coat of arms. The Earl of Tirconnell died in a few weeks; and within two years O’Neill was almost the last of the little band of exiles. He made more than one ineffectual appeal to be permitted to return to Ireland and occupy a portion of his old estates. With 7,000 crowns contributed by the Archduke, he purchased at Rouen a vessel of eighty tons, mounting sixteen guns, manned her with marines in disguise, freighted her with a cargo of salt, and sailed for Ireland. The officials and adventurers who had looked forward to the forfeiture of his lands were also disgusted at being baulked of their expected prey. Lord Mountjoy abandoned the old system of marching in force across the country, dispersing the insurgents merely to rally again, and occupied various posts in the disturbed districts, whence he was able to send out flying columns.

The victory prompted rebellions all over Ireland, assisted by mobile contingents from Ulster. O’Donnell, imposed a sympathetic chief on the MacWilliam Burkes of Mayo and, with the aid of Scottish mercenaries and midlands lords such as Nugent of Westmeath, massacred the nascent English settlement in Connacht. Hugh O’Neill appointed James Fitzthomas Fitzgerald (a nephew of the late Earl Gerald) as the new Earl of Desmond (referred to by his detractors as the sugan or “straw-rope” earl) and Florence MacCarthy as the MacCarthy Mór. In September 1595 on the death of Turlough Luineach, the earl travelled to Tullaghogue to receive the prohibited title of ‘O’Neill’.

Von Hügel combined a deep faith in the Roman Catholic Church with tolerant views that won him friends among thinkers of many denominations. When the Modernist crisis broke out in the early 20th century, his close contacts with such Modernist leaders as Alfred Firmin Loisy and George Tyrrell led him to be classed with those who undermined the church. Although not a Modernist himself, he served as something like a broker for the movement, facilitating the exchange of ideas and offering moral support to his censured friends. Indeed, it was von Hügel who introduced Tyrrell to the works of the Continental Modernists and thus played a role in Tyrrell’s increasingly liberal theology. In fact, von Hügel fully accepted the papacy but thought the methods of church government suffered from overcentralization, which he hoped to counteract by the healthy interplay of energy between head and members.

The stipulations were that they abandon their Irish titles (thus becoming Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell rather than O’Neill and O’Donnell), abandon the Brehon laws, private armies, their control over their uirithe and swear loyalty only to the Crown of England. O’Neill was even given authority over O’Cahan, whom he never forgave for his desertion during the war. English forces used the brutal tactics of the Desmond wars, devastating the Ulster countryside and killing the civilian population at random. Their military assumption was that without crops and people, the rebels could neither feed themselves nor raise new fighters. Mountjoy managed to penetrate the interior of Ulster by sea-borne landings at Derry under Henry Dowcra and Carrigfergus under Arthur Chichester, while trying himself to break through overland through south-east Ulster. Carew managed to more or less quash the rebellion in  Munster by mid 1601 by a mixture of conciliation and military force.

Hugh O’Neill spent his last days in Rome, where he died in 1616 being buried next to his son in San Pietro. His death is the last entry in the Annals of the Four Masters, the best-known account of medieval Irish history. In 1568 Hugh O’Neill was reestablished in Ulster by Lord Deputy Sidney, and for the next twenty years he was the English Crown’s agent there against the pretensions of Shane’s sons and his eventual successor Turlough Luineach O’Neill.

O’Neill’s men became the nucleus of the Ulster army of Confederate Ireland – a de facto independent Irish state. Hugh Dubh was captured early in the war by Scottish Covenanter enemies, but was exchanged back to his own side after the Confederate victory at the Battle of Benburb in 1646. He subsequently rose to prominence after the death of his commander, Owen Roe O’Neill, in 1649.

The “loyal Irish” (that is those who had fought with the English in the war) received a quarter of the worst land. Two of these, Cahir O’Doherty and Niall Garbh O’Donnell, launched a futile rebellion in protest, which succeeded only in getting themselves hanged. Hugh O’Neill and the other surviving Ulster lords fled Ireland in 1607, paving the way for the Plantation of Ulster. Ulster and north Connacht was utterly devastated, burned and plundered, the people starved, killed and driven to the hills and woods for refuge. Most of the country had been fought over at some stage, its land ruined, civilians of all sides killed and looted.

O’Neill himself speaks of his ‘education amongst the English’ rather than in England itself. This misconception seems to have arisen from Sidney’s assertion in his 1583 Memoir that O’Neill was ‘bred in my house from a little-boy, then very poor of goods and full feebly friended’ (UJA, iii (1855), 92). In the context of Sidney’s Irish service, this is plainly a reference to his Dublin household and refers either to the boy’s initial arrival in the Pale or more likely to the mid 1560s, when Hugh became politically important with the renewal of war against Shane. Hugh O’Neill (1550–1616), the second earl of Tyrone and last inaugurated chief of the O’Neills, was the major Irish leader of the Counter-Reformation period. In 1599, the Earl of Essex arrived in Ireland with over 17,000 English reinforcements, a huge army for the time and place. He dispersed them in garrisons all over the country to stamp out rebellion in Muster and Leinster, but was unable to meet the Ulster forces in battle, instead signing a humiliating truce with O’Neill.

I have not been able to find any O’Neal/var.s mentioned in the English Americas before him. In fact, what IS surprising is that there were actually settlers of Irish nationality in the Americas of the early 1600’s. Capt. Hugh was living in what was started as essentially an Irish Catholic safe haven-colony in the Americas hugh oneal in 1634, by the Irish Catholic Lord Baltimore, which colony, ironically, also became more so a safe-haven for English Puritans and Reformists. There is absolutely no proof – not even rumor – that the Hugh O’Neill allegedly born c. 1700, or his wife Anne Cox, had themselves, personally, immigrated to the Americas.

George Montgomery (qv), the new protestant bishop, as well as clamping down on catholic worship also encouraged Donnell O’Cahan (qv) to leave his wife, O’Neill’s daughter Rose, and to return to his first wife, and then to seek separate patents to his lands. A key promoter of the rights of Gaelic freeholders was the new attorney general, Sir John Davies (qv), who seized on the opportunity that O’Cahan’s desire for independence from O’Neill offered. There is no satisfactory explanation for the panicked flight of Hugh O’Neill, Ruaidhrí O’Donnell, and their dependents from Rathmullen in September 1607. Clearly pressure was again building up against the Gaelic lords of Ulster and this time they had no recourse to armed revolt.

O’ Neill had at first aided the English in their 1593 campaign against the Maguires of Fermanagh. Hugh Maguire was O’ Neill’s son-in-law and when O’ Neill suddenly withdrew his support Bagenal was left dangerously exposed. In 1591 he had eloped with 20-year-old Mabel Bagenal the sister of Sir Henry the Marshall of the queen’s army. He helped arrange the escape from prison of Red Hugh O’Donnell along with Art and Henry MacShane O’Neill.

In 1615, amid heightening rumours of his return, a conspiracy was discovered in Ulster which saw his nephew Brian Crosach mac Cormac O’Neill hanged and his left-behind son, Conn, moved to England. The earl remained anxious to leave Rome to take up a forward position in the Low Countries but died in Rome 20 July 1616. He was interred at San Piedro in Montorio, Rome’s Spanish-run Franciscan church, alongside his son Hugh and his erstwhile brothers-in-law Ruaidhrí and Caffar O’Donnell.

“No Man Left Behind”

When the Crown attempted to replicate the Monaghan settlement in County Fermanagh, O’Neill organized his relatives and adherents in a proxy war, but to allay suspicion, he fought on the government side, even getting himself wounded at the battle of the Erne (1593). Eventually, he was proclaimed a traitor by the Crown in 1595, and in the same year he succeeded Turlough Luineach as holder of the banned Gaelic title of “The O’Neill.” At the Treaty of Mellifont, O’Neill, O’Donnell and the other surviving Ulster chiefs received full pardons and the return of their estates. “We have killed, burnt and spoiled …within four miles of Dungannon…we have killed above 100 people of all sorts, besides such as were burnt, how many I know not.

By 1585 he controlled half of Tyrone and in 1587 was acknowledged by the Crown as earl of Tyrone. He had achieved this power not only by English connections and support but also through an extensive network of marriage alliances and fosterage arrangements. The Crown set out to contain this power by kidnapping and jailing Red Hugh O’Donnell, his sonin-law and the heir apparent of Tirconnell. Then followed Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam’s attempt to reform Ulster by dismantling the power of the great lords generally, which was inaugurated by the execution of Hugh

MacMahon and the partition of the lordship of Monaghan in 1589 and 1590. The major beneficiary of this process was O’Neill’s opponent, the prospective governor of Ulster, Sir Henry Bagenal.

• He was similarly annoyed when Perrot began a new round of surrender-and-regrant agreements with minor Ulster lords, which threatened to detach the uirríthe from his clutches.
• This victory—the most serious defeat sustained by the English in the Irish wars—sparked a countrywide revolt.
• However Henry IV of France welcomed the fugitives, firmly refusing requests from London to have them arrested, but deftly guiding them to the Spanish Netherlands rather than to Spain.

Thirdly, by giving legal status to the free-holders it would completely eliminate all of his personal political power by ending his ability to muster and maintain an army. There was a short but bloody war in the Mac William Burke  (northern Connacht) country, in 1588, when over a thousand Scottish gallowglass were imported by the Burkes to prevent the introduction of an English sheriff. All of them died in a murderous battle with Bingham, the President of Connacht at Ardnaree.[7] Having pacified Connacht, Fitzwilliam prepared to move on to Ulster. Hugh O’Neill, while he had less support within Tir Eoin, made intelligent use of his neighbours’ hatred of the MacShanes by making alliances through marriage with the most powerful of those neighbours. The most important ties he forged were with the O’Donnells of Tir Connell (modern Donegal), in particular a young pretender called Aodh Rua – Red Hugh, and the MacGuires of Fermanagh.

Neither O’Neill nor O’Donnell wanted to fight, but their reputations were at stake and they eventually agreed to a Spanish plan for an advance towards the English front line. Once the Irish took up position on a particular hill, the Spaniards were to come out of the town and break through the English trenches to join up with them. On the morning of 24 December 1601 (OS)/3 January (NS) Chat GPT the Irish reached the required position, but when they were spotted and Mountjoy ordered out his men, O’Neill decided to retreat. Having retreated over two small rivers, the 5,000-strong Irish army drew up behind a bog, but a cavalry charge by Mountjoy’s much smaller force routed them. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. 1,200 were killed, another 800 wounded to die later, and many more died on the long journey home.

Later when this had been achieved he met Hugh Maguire (qv), his cousin and new son-in-law, at Castle Toome. Subsequently Maguire went on the offensive against the Binghams in north Connacht and O’Neill had Phelim mac Turlough O’Neill, who had links with Bagenal, assassinated by the O’Hagans. With a mounting number of allegations against the earl’s loyalty, the state called him to account in Dundalk. Between 14 and 28 June 1593, charges that O’Neill had conspired with papist bishops, taken oaths with other Ulster lords, assisted Maguire, and murdered Phelim mac Turlough were examined.

Although O’Neill managed to repulse another land offensive by Mountjoy at Moyry Pass near Newry in 1600, his position was becoming desperate. Had Spanish troops landed in force in 1598, it would have been next to impossible for the English to hold or re-conquer the island. Nevertheless, cooped up in the Pale and the walled towns, the future for the English must have seemed very bleak indeed. In addition, O’Neill dispatched over 2,000 men from Ulster to the south, partly to aid the rebels, but also to take supplies he would need to sustain his troops throughout the winter. The Munster plantation was utterly destroyed, the colonists, among them Edmund Spenser and Walter Raleigh, fled for their lives. The greater part of the Irish elite flirted with both sides during the war, wanting to be on the winning side, but large numbers of them clearly preferred a future that would be determined by themselves rather than the English.

Sir John and Sir Thomas Norris marched north with a force of some 3,000 men; but could do little more than strengthen the English garrison at Armagh. Pope Clement VIII lent moral support to Tyrone’s cause, and, in September 1601, 4,000 Spanish troops arrived in Ireland at Kinsale, Munster, to assist the insurrection. These reinforcements, however, were quickly surrounded at Kinsale, and Tyrone suffered a staggering defeat in December 1601 while attempting to break the siege. The new settlements were banned from taking native tenants or employing them as labourers – thus banishing the Gaelic Irish to the worst land in the hills and bogs. In east Ulster, a private plantation occurred on the lands of the Clandeboye O’Neills, which had been almost depopulated during the war. Only the MacDonnells in Antrim survived relatively intact, having good contacts with the new Scottish monarch, James I.

The iconic associations of the O’Neill name were even recognized in a short-lived television series, if a variant spelling can be forgiven. The Real O’Neals, starring Martha Plimpton and Jay R. Ferguson, centered on an Irish-Catholic family in Chicago, whose attempts to reconcile their traditional values with marital break-ups, homosexuality, and atheism drove the plot of the show. Though the series was cancelled after its second season, it showed a step toward acknowledging the unique space occupied by Irish Americans in the United States today. The O’Neills made the entertainment industry into a family business, as well. Ryan O’Neal (b. 1941) started out as a boxer and worked his way into film and television, breaking out in the soap opera Peyton Place, and earning an Oscar nomination for his lead role in Love Story (1970).

The real signifier of power in Ulster was not the legal title of Earl of Tyrone, but the position of The O’Neill, still held in the 1580s by the ageing Turlough Lineach. This title gave its holder the right to the obedience of all the O’Neills and their dependents in central Ulster. But if the English were under https://chat.openai.com/ the impression they had in Hugh O’Neill a man who would faithfully do their bidding, they were greatly mistaken. Hugh, as his actions would make clear, was as attached to autonomy and independent military power as any of his ancestors had been, and more shrewd, innovative and ruthless than any of them.

Hugh O’Neill initially went to war for a negotiated settlement but as the war went on, he declared he was fighting for Irish self government and the Catholic religion. Not satisfied with the customary tribute or rents from his fine, he extended his control directly over the territory. Within this domain, he tied the peasantry to the land, making them effectively serfs and guaranteeing his supply of labour.

Nevertheless family, fosterage, and later marriage connections were as much a part of O’Neill’s success as government backing. Whereas the state later insisted that he had been raised from the dust to be ‘a creature of our own’ (Cambridge University Library, MS Kk1 15, no. 31, ff 87–8), he countered that he had gained what was his by right through ‘scratching in the world’ (CSPI, 1596–7, 484). In the event Hugh recouped his position by fighting alongside the 1st earl of Essex (qv) and was rewarded handsomely by him for his services. Essex could not defeat Turlough, but his erection of the Blackwater fort benefited not only the crown but the baron too. The latter further hemmed Turlough in at this time by reorientating his marriage alliance – dumping the daughter of Sir Brian MacPhelim O’Neill (qv) of Clandeboye in favour of Siobhán, daughter of Sir Aodh O’Donnell (qv) (d. 1600) of Tirconnell. The crown eventually tired of the confederate attempts to frustrate the settlement, and in 1597 replaced Russell with Lord Burgh (qv) as lord deputy.

He distinguished himself at the Siege of Clonmel in May 1650, inflicting the worst casualties ever experienced by the New Model Army. He was then made commander of the defenders at the Siege of Limerick ( ), fighting off the Parliamentarians’ first attempt to take the city in late 1650. However, the following year, Henry Ireton besieged the city again, eventually forcing Hugh Dubh to surrender when the city’s population was dying of hunger and plague, and part of his garrison mutinied against him. Under the terms of surrender, Hugh Dubh was to be executed for his stubborn defence of the city, but the Parliamentarian general Edmund Ludlow did not carry out the sentence and instead sent Hugh Dubh into imprisonment in the Tower of London. O’Neill’s growing frustration is palpable as we read the correspondence between Rome and Madrid during his period of exile. He mordantly described his situation after his surrender to the English crown as “destruction by peace”.

It is not far from Tullaghogue Fort, inauguration site of new O’Neill leaders. The site was later occupied by British forces in the 1900s, used to monitor rebellion during the Troubles. When Nial Gluin Dubh (Niall of the Back Knee), the King of Ireland from 890 until 919 A.D., was killed fighting the raiding Norsemen, his grandson Domhnall adopted the surname Neill.

For instance, it was Cormac MacBaron who defeated the English relief column to the beleaguered garrison in Enniskillen at the battle of the Ford of Biscuits on the River Arney, with the earl only turning up later to claim his share of the booty. Soon after O’Neill had the audacity to visit the new lord deputy, Sir William Russell (qv), in Dublin and gave a bravura performance which saw him return home in triumph. When the earl’s half-brother, Art MacBaron, took the Blackwater fort in early 1595, the state’s tolerance cracked.

He and O’Donnell marched their armies south to relieve the Spaniards besieged in Kinsale but were decisively defeated. O’Neill’s hitherto victorious army was smashed in an English cavalry charge that resulted in the death of one Englishman and 1,200 Irish. Deserted by his allies and with Ulster reduced to starvation, O’Neill surrendered to Lord Deputy Mountjoy at Mellifont in March 1603. Elizabeth’s successor, King James I, allowed Tyrone to keep most of his lands, but the chieftain soon found that he could not bear the loss of his former independence and prestige.

He won great victories over English armies at Clontibret (1595) and the Yellow Ford (1598), and he exploited these victories to extend his oath-bound confederacy throughout Ireland in an Irish Catholic revolt against English Protestant colonial domination. By 1596 he had secured a compromise peace with England but decided instead to take up an offer of support from Spain. His most famous such negotiation was his encounter with the earl of Essex at the Ford of Bellaclinthe on the borders of Ulster (1599). Yet O’Neill’s increasingly overt Catholic stance and propaganda in Ireland failed to win over the Old English Catholics of the towns, who did not trust his threats and blandishments. The Archduke Albert received private information of the finding of the letter, and the intention of the Government to seize O’Neill and the northern lords. After all, they were returned their lands and given responsible positions in the new order.

Commissions and soldiers given to Hugh to defend the Ulster borders, which allowed the state to deploy its forces elsewhere, gave Hugh the opportunity to extent his influence over the uirríthe in south-east Ulster. Born about 1550 into the powerful O’Neill family of Ulster, Hugh grew up in London, England, and then returned to Ireland in 1568 to assume his grandfather’s title of earl of Tyrone. As chieftain of the O’Neills from 1593, he led skirmishes against the English beginning in 1595 and won the Battle of the Yellow Ford on the River Blackwater, Ulster, on August 14, 1598. This victory—the most serious defeat sustained by the English in the Irish wars—sparked a countrywide revolt. The fugitives’ ship did not reach Spain as they hoped but was driven by storms into port at Quilleboeuf in Normandy. The French king, Henri IV, who ranked O’Neill after Nassau and Spinola as ‘the third of the great captains’ (Damaschino, La spada, 385), refused English demands to hand over the refugees and instead permitted them free passage to the Spanish Netherlands.

To put this into perspective, as late as the 1540s, the total tax revenue of the Tudor monarchy amounted to about £31,000.[4] While it had expanded since then, it was clear that O’Neill had made himself rich enough to rival the state. After much vicious bloodshed within Tir Eoin, Hugh finally forced Turlough Lineach to name him tanaiste in 1592. This made him effective ruler of the O’Neill lands, although Turlough Lineach did not die until 1595. There still remained one province of Ireland still unoccupied by English garrisons and out of the control of Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam in Dublin – Ulster. Capt. Hugh O’Neill/O’Neal, Indian fighter, was living in Charles Co., Maryland in the mid 1600’s and was probably born about 1630 (his assumed sister, and confirmed sister-in-law, Sarah (n�e O’Neal) Doughtie, would have been born about 1635).

Pietro in Montorio provides an opportunity for Irish visitors to reflect, to pray and to contemplate the imponderables of their history. The remaining O’Neills split into two septs; the senior branch were called the Tyrone O’Neills and the younger branch were known as the “Clan Aedh Buidhe,” the Yellow-haired Hughs or Clanaboy. The O’Neills were known by the nickname “Creagh” which comes from the Gaelic word “craobh” meaning branch, because they were known to camouflage themselves to resemble the forest when fighting the Norsemen. Another story tells of three O’Neill brothers who were given laurel branches as a result of their victory over the Vikings and added the nickname “Creagh” to their names.

From Red Hugh O’Donnell he got a supply of Scottish mercenaries – O’Donnell’s mother, Inion Dubh, was from the MacDonald clan of western Scotland – and a threat to Turlough Lineach’s seat at Strabane. Internecine fighting soon broke out among those O’Neills who wanted to succeed him. The position of tanaiste (second in command and probable successor) was contested by Hugh and the MacShane O’Neills, sons of Shane O’Neill – the late, self proclaimed, Prince of Ulster. The MacShanes name gave them greater prestige than Hugh, and they were the preferred choice of Turlough Lineach. The neighbouring clans hated them for the cruelties of their father Shane and had no desire to have one of them as an overlord.

O’Neal’s children embraced the world of show business as well, his daughter Tatum O’Neal (b. 1967) becoming the youngest ever to win a competitive Oscar at age 10 for her part in Paper Moon, which they had starred in together. To the legendary warrior king of Ireland, Niall Noigiallach (Niall of the Nine Hostages), who is said to have been responsible for bringing St. Patrick to Ireland. Mountjoy’s forces had by that time been reduced by death and sickness, and the necessity of occupying minor posts, to 6,587. The relics of the force escaped by capitulation, and Armagh, with the other northern garrisons, surrendered a few days afterwards. O’Donnell invaded Connaught in March and April, plundered the recent English settlements, and destroyed several castles.