HE SAID what?
Donal Cam O’Sullivan Beare could hardly believe his own ears when his messenger conveyed Juan del Águila’s polite rejection of his offer of two thousand troops. Sitting in his windswept stone castle some 120km from Kinsale, the fifty-year-old Gaelic chieftain had never felt so insulted and so bewildered at the same time.
Donal Cam controlled Beara and Bantry, a remote finger of County Cork pointing across the chilly Atlantic towards the Americas. And with thousands of warriors at his disposal, he had thought he was in a position to end the escalating Kinsale standoff with a game-changing intervention.
O’Sullivan Beare’s sympathies were firmly with the invaders. He may have been born on this far-western salient of Ireland – but there was no doubt about his bloodline and ancestry. With his Don Quixote moustache and goatee, he looked more Spanish than the Spaniards themselves. According to one source: ‘His face of dark olive complexion [was] lighted with large dazzling eyes … and wore a peculiar air of Spanish haughtiness.’ He had been given the nickname ‘Cam’, or ‘crooked’, thought to be as a result of a disfiguring injury to his shoulder. He felt this disability had challenged him and made him stronger by tempering the ‘inward conceit’ he had shown in his youth.
Donal Cam claimed to hate the English oppressors, whom he regarded as ‘these merciless, heretical enemies’. Now he had an opportunity to strike back. As his nephew Philip O’Sullivan later recorded: ‘[He] sent a messenger to Águila to say he and his friends had 1,000 armed men, and as many unarmed men unlisted, and if Águila would only supply arms for them, they would block [Blount’s] road and prevent a siege until O’Neill and O’Donnell came to his assistance.’ All Águila had to do was supply Donal Cam with guns and cash for a thousand men.
But after making a few inquiries among his Irish expatriate supporters in Kinsale, Águila discovered that things were not quite so straightforward. O’Sullivan Beare’s credentials as a rebel were not impressive. He had acquired an English lordship by ferociously lobbying the very Queen he now claimed to despise. In a grovelling submission, he had emphasised how he had helped the English to defeat a previous Irish rising and how he had repudiated the system the Gaels used to elect their chieftains.
In response the English ousted his uncle, who was the foremost claimant under the Gaelic system, and appointed Donal Cam as ‘The Queen’s O’Sullivan’. At a stroke, he had gained full control over a small but lucrative fiefdom with a castle and several thousand inhabitants.
Now this same man was asking for a thousand guns. But was he a convert to the cause – or a double agent? It was a gamble that Águila was not willing to take. His reply to Donal Cam was diplomatic. His spare guns were with Zubiaur, he said, and he could not enlist any locals until they were vetted and approved by O’Neill and O’Donnell.
The rejection provided Mateo de Oviedo with yet another complaint to record in his little black book. ‘[Many Irish] would have come, as they did at the start, if we had trusted them and given armaments to them,’ he wrote later, ‘but we did nothing of the sort.’
By mid-October, English troops were being diverted to Kinsale from Leinster, Connaught and the north. One commander, Henry Danvers, had made particularly good time – his men marched the 200km from Dublin to Cork in just six days. (This shows that Águila was not being unrealistic in expecting O’Neill to travel from the north within two weeks.) Thousands more were on the way. Secretary Cecil had been busy conscripting troops all over England, and they were gathering at the West Country ports of Barnstaple and Bristol. A few of these were volunteers, but the vast majority had been dragged into the army by force.
The system worked like this. In each region, local authorities would be ordered to raise a quota. Naturally, they chose the misfits they wanted to get rid of: tramps, drifters and lawbreakers. (Sometimes even condemned criminals flatly refused to enlist, saying they preferred the gallows to dying like dogs in Ireland.)
An official known as a ‘conductor’ marched them to a mustering centre. Along the way, their bags were usually ransacked and their clothes stolen. By the time the conscripts reached port, only the dregs were left. Those who had any cash had bribed themselves free, and the fittest had escaped. The system was almost guaranteed to ensure that those who remained were least suited to be soldiers. One group bound for Cork was described as ‘either old, lame, diseased, boys or common rogues. Few of them have any clothes: small, weak, starved bodies.’
The situation was further complicated by the curious system of ‘dead pays’. A dead-pay was a non-existent soldier whose pay went into the captain’s pocket. There could be six phantom soldiers in every company of a hundred, but no one ever knew for sure until they actually lined up for fighting. ‘[Ensure] they deceive you not with dead-pays and turn out to have no companies when the time comes for service,’ one commander was advised.
Cecil’s pitiful conscripts set sail from Bristol along with the big guns and the skilled workers Blount desperately needed. There was only one problem – the wind was blowing in precisely the wrong direction.
‘God send us an easterly wind,’ Blount prayed as he kicked his heels in his temporary camp.
His prayers were eventually answered. But when the wind did blow from England, it blew so hard that the thirteen ships were propelled right past Kinsale and several miles further to the west, leaving a frustrated Blount praying for a westerly wind instead.
There is a common misconception that Águila’s Spaniards remained safely inside the town during the Siege of Kinsale, while the Irish did all the fighting. This not only flies in the face of all the evidence (in fact, many Spaniards died in fierce fighting outside the walls), but also misunderstands the nature of warfare in the early 1600s. The new technology of warfare had resulted in a shift away from dramatic, set-piece battles towards long, grinding sieges. The last thing a defender like Águila could do was to wait passively inside a fortress as the attackers burrowed their way closer to his walls. As soon as darkness fell each night, the defenders had to be out there, harassing the besiegers, delaying their trench diggers, and spiking their guns. It was more like a modern sabotage mission than a mediaeval battle, although dozens could die in the vicious hand-to-hand combat. Each attack was known as a ‘sally’.
A military expert named John Muller described the process as it was in the early 1600s: ‘The besieged had opportunities to sally out and fall upon the workmen and their guard on every side, drive them out of their works and destroy them … to nail up the guns and batteries, or to surprise a part of the guard in the trenches.’
A successful sally took place under cover of darkness. ‘Sallies are never made in the daytime [except] by a presumptuous enemy, for then they are easily repulsed,’ Muller wrote. The only way to prevent a sally was constant vigilance. The besiegers would post patrols in no-man’s-land. ‘[They must] remain in profound silence till they hear or perceive some motion.’
The night of 19 October saw the first real clash between the two sides as Águila’s Spaniards sallied out from their trenches and clashed with Blount’s front-line guards. There were no injuries, but (at least according to the English) Águila was impressed with the courage of his enemy’s troops.
—I never saw any [men] come more willingly to the sword, he said.
The following night, war erupted in earnest with the first casualties of the conflict. Águila despatched up to half of his entire force in a major offensive. Marching silently in the darkness, they wheeled around behind Knockrobin Hill and climbed the rise until they were directly overlooking the enemy camp. But a night patrol spotted them on the hill and beat them back into Kinsale. Four Spaniards died in that first engagement.
The English consolidated their first victory with a propaganda coup. They enlisted the aid of an Irish clan leader called Cormac McDermot, who had first offered his services to Águila but had now switched sides.
Earlier, McDermot had sent a gift of a hackney horse to the Spanish commander in Kinsale. Águila, who desperately needed warhorses, had looked at the delicate trotting-horse and responded in despair: ‘Doth the country yield no greater horses than these?’
Blount ordered McDermot to march his Irish troops right up to the Spanish trenches in order to test his loyalty. As a precaution, he posted a larger force out of sight behind a hill.
But Blount need not have worried. McDermot launched an all-out attack on the Spanish, driving them out of their trenches before pulling back.
Blount threw in his reserve force under his friend Sir William Godolphin, a Cornishman who consolidated the Irishmen’s victory and managed to pull off a spectacular rescue in the process. One English cavalry officer who had charged deep into the Spanish ranks had lost his horse and become stranded. Glancing around, he ‘espied himself in great danger’. Ignoring the blistering fire from the Spanish muskets, Godolphin charged between the parallel lines of enemy trenches to rescue him. An eyewitness said Godolphin returned unhurt ‘to the marvel of all the beholders, considering the multitude of shot made at them’.
Encouraged by the episode, the English decided to try to force an entry into the town itself. After dark on 25 October, a strike force of three hundred troops mounted a concentrated attack with pikes. The Spanish guards were surprised and retreated into Kinsale. The English ‘fell into the gate with them’, killing more than twenty Spanish before being beaten back again.
A pattern was being established, and it wasn’t in the Spaniards’ favour. Inside Kinsale, Águila was rapidly losing patience with his officers. And his officers were rapidly losing patience with him.